Perceptions of variation in second-generation Montrealers' speech : methods for remote ethnolinguistic research

This dissertation assesses if and how ethnicity plays a role in speech perception amongst French speakers in Montreal, Quebec. Is ethnolinguistic variation present, and is it noticeable to Montrealers? In so doing, this work highlights the conflicting nature of two bodies of work: ethnographic and cultural studies research on immigrant communities in Montreal and sociolinguistic research on the region. The former underscores the importance of ethnic and cultural heritage in second-generation speakers’ self-presentation and speech, while the latter assumes that these same speakers have uniformly assimilated to a regional norm. For this dissertation, I aimed to collect and analyze data to better adjudicate between these hypotheses. As such, I created a new corpus, featuring women from the three largest ethnic / cultural communities in Montreal: Haitian, North African, and Quebecker, and experimented with techniques for running an exploratory perceptual experiment remotely. This study speaks to (i) methods of recruitment for remote sociolinguistic interviews, (ii) methods of conducting experiments online, (iii) techniques used in the free classification approach to perception tasks (Clopper & Pisoni, 2007), (iv) how second-generation Montrealers’ speech is perceived, and (v) why disciplines contradict each other with regard to these communities.French and Italia