Language and Dialect Death: Theorising sound change in obsolescent Gascon

This book analyses linguistic changes motivated by the processes of language and dialect obsolescence; it investigates linguistic variation and change in Gascon, an obsolescent variety of southern Gallo-Romance or langue d'oc, historically spoken in south-western France. The study focuses on the interplay between the linguistic mechanisms active during language and dialect death as Gascon contracts under pressure from both the national language, French, and the standardised langue d'oc variety, Occitan. The analysis compares variation in pronunciation and sound changes in the speech of older Gascon native speakers and younger Occitan 'new speakers' from the same area, using a large-scale sociolinguistic methodology. This book advances the study of language contraction and death, not only by documenting variation in this severely endangered variety, but by providing the first theoretical analysis of obsolescence in southern Gallo-Romance and by setting its findings within the context of well-established sociolinguistic theories of language and dialect contact.