Sylvie Dubois is Gabrielle Muir Professor in French Studies. She studies language use in everyday situations, focusing particularly on bilingual and minority language contexts in Louisiana.Professor Dubois has devoted her time and energy to community service and the promotion of French in Louisiana. Her research agendahas promoted the cultural and intellectual heritage of Louisiana. She has two on-going research projects: 1- Louisiana French religious correspondence during the XVII and XIX centuries; 2- creation and transcription of a New England corpus of French spoken in Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire. Professor Dubois has received many grants from U.S. federal agencies as well as Canadian funding agencies. She has written three books, published more than fifty additional articles in highly-regarded collections and in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. Professor Dubois’s many contributions to the advancement of science have been recognized by a wide array of honors and the French Government acknowledged her prominence by naming her Chevalier des Palmes Academiques.

 

Sociolinguistics, archival research, bilingualism, Cajun French and varieties of English spoken in the U.S., minority languages, linguistic policies

Dubois' last project "Ad Fontes: the origin of the French language in Louisiana" is part of a major collaborative research initiative on the French language in North America, Le français à la mesure d'un continent: un patrimoine en partage (French in North America - A Shared Heritage), which includes 14 co-investigators from French, American, and Canadian universities.  

This seven-year project (2011-18) is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada ($2,500,000). Dubois' cutting-edge research on the cultural and intellectual heritage of Louisiana will contribute to the advancement of this pluridisciplinary research initiative. It will alsoraise Louisiana's importance within the worldwide scholarship on the French language and give scholars one of the richer sources in the study of French.

 

Dubois, Sylvie. 2014. Cajun Vernacular English. In Ryan Orgera and Wayne Parent (eds.) The Louisiana Field Guide: Understanding Life in the Pelican State. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, p 91-95.

(Accepted). Salmon, Carole and Dubois, Sylvie. À la recherche du français en Nouvelle-Angleterre: une enquête de terrain à travers six états. Journal of French Language Studies.

Dubois, Sylvie. 2014.  Autant en emporte la langue: la saga louisianaise du français. In S. Mufwene & C. Vigouroux (eds.), Globalization and the French Language.Paris: Odile Jacob. p.198-232.

Dubois, Sylvie (ed). 2011. Une histoire épistolaire de la Louisiane. Collection les Voies du francais. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval.

Dubois, Sylvie, 2010. Plaidoyer pour locuteurs restreints: une analyse sociolinguistique des innovations en français cadien. In P. Blanchet and P. Martinez (eds.) Pratiques du plurilinguisme: Emergence et prise en compte en situation francophones. Collection actualités scientifique. Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, p.107-114.

Dubois, Sylvie et Carole Salmon. 2010. Le degré d’accommodation linguistique du français cadien de Louisiane. In Jean-Pierre Cuq et Patrick Chardennet, Faire vivre les identités: un parcours en Francophonie. Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines. p.25-39.

Salmon, Carole et Sylvie Dubois. 2010. Etre franco-américain et être cadien: une identité culturelle ou linguistique? In. Dimensions du dialogisme 2 : Construction identitaire dans la communication interpersonnelle, Collection Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, Finlande, p.329-378.

Wrobleski, Michael, Thea Strand, and Sylvie Dubois. 2010. Mapping a dialect “mixtury”: Comparing vowel phonology of African American and white men in rural southern Louisiana (with ). In Yaeger-Dror Malcah and Eric Thomas (dirs) Variation in English among African-Americans. Publications of the American Dialect Society 94, p.1-15.

Dubois, Sylvie and Barbara Horvath. Forthcoming. The Persistence of Dialect Features. In Michael D. Picone and Catherine Evans Davis (eds.) Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. p.754-788.

Dubois, Sylvie. Forthcoming. Whither Cajun French: Language Persistence and Dialectal Upsurges. In Michael D. Picone and Catherine Evans Davis (eds.) Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. p.1327-1354

 

Courses Taught

FREN 7980, FREN 7982, FREN 7962, FREN 4065

 

Students

Marguerite Perkins: Ph.D. in French Linguistics (on-going)
Natacha Jeudy: Ph.D. in French Linguistics (on-going)