Language and Dialect Death - Theorising Sound Change in Obsolescent Gascon

This book offers a systematic acoustic phonetic analysis of both language and dialect death in the region of Béarn, southwestern France. Focusing on Béarnais, a localised dialect of Gascon which is under pressure from French, the author explores the socio-political process of language shift, whereby members of a speech community cease to speak their indigenous language in favour of an incoming dominant language. Gascon is at an advanced stage of this process, making its remaining speakers excellent candidates for the study of language obsolescence, and this unique study will be of interest to researchers working in a broad range of disciplines, including language variation and change, language and dialect contact, Occitan and French, sociophonetics and phonology.


Damien Mooney is Associate Professor in French Linguistics and Language Change at the University of Bristol, UK. His research focuses on contact induced transfer in bilingual speech, language death theory, and on the role of language and dialect contact in the loss or retention of pronunciation and grammatical features in regional varieties of French and the regional languages of France.