22 July 2024

Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett (University of Cambridge) and Professor Mairi McLaughlin (UC Berkeley, Cambridge alumna) have co-edited the newly published Oxford Handbook of the French Language, featuring 32 chapters by different specialists on French from a range of fields and disciplines. In this interview, Professor Ayres-Bennett explains the book’s purpose, the research it covers, and the editorial decisions that have made it both unique and timely. The book is available to people with access to Cambridge libraries via iDiscover.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Looking at each of the chapters, there is published work on all of those things individually. What made you want to bring that all together into one volume?

I thought it was an interesting project—there’s nothing like it in English. It is surprising, but there’s nothing like it. What we liked is the opportunity to really do what we wanted with it. We were given a fairly free range to design it and shape it. And while in some ways it looks traditional, we tried to do some things which are different. We tried to bring in, for example, the whole Francophone world—getting away from the idea that you just give examples from the French of France, but that you broaden out your varieties as part of the decolonising and decentering work which is really important in all points of the curriculum now.

And we thought about questions of equality, inclusion, and diversity. So for example we tried, when we were choosing our [language usage] examples, inspired by a very good article, not to have an example like “minister (male name) does this,” or “Mary cooks the dinner while John mends the car”—to get away from those kinds of traditional examples. And there’s an opening up onto interdisciplinary questions at the end, so there’s a chapter on French vocal music which looks at rap in Quebec, which is really interesting—from a linguistic point of view, but also from a cultural point of view. And looking at new media, looking at digital discourse, and how social media is changing the face of French.

Who’s the book for?

It’s intended for a broad audience. It’s intended for undergraduates who want to get a short introduction to a particular area of French language and French linguistics; certainly postgrads, because it also gives cutting-edge research and ideas for new research projects, and where the gaps are in the ecology currently; and then I think for the broader world of researchers.

It was intended to have, if you like, basic information, canonical studies, to get people started, but then to marry that with this cutting-edge research so that you could open up onto bigger questions.

How much have you chosen to consider changes in contemporary usage, especially with regard to gender and issues like non-binary nouns?

That’s one of the things that features across the handbook. In my own chapter, I talk about how we deal with the names of professions and careers in French, which has been a very hot topic—whether you use a male form to include women, whether you put an ‘e’ on the end, whether you put a suffix on the end, how you deal with that. What pronouns you use—there’s been a lot of debate about that and it’s still quite a new issue. And then how you make agreement—the Académie [Française] has always taken the stance that you use the masculine as the generic form, whereas many of us resist against that. So it’s a very live issue, and one that runs across many of the chapters.

I think where French is going is a question that is very interesting. There’s discussion of the new kind of contact varieties which are emerging—what they call multicultural urban varieties, for example, in Marseilles or Paris, where you get a sort of melting pot of languages coming together and new varieties emerging.

Is there anything that you would have liked to include that you couldn’t?

I think at the moment there is not a lot about the role of research on race and the French language. It’s beginning to emerge as a subject, but it’s something that we would like to see more of. Questions of gender and age and socio-economic status have a fairly long tradition now of being researched, but race and ethnicity is a new and emerging area.

I saw you’ve published on women as linguists. There’s a fairly even gender balance in authors in this volume.

I think we were very conscious of that. My co-editor is also a Cambridge alumna, Mairi McLaughlin, who did her BA, MPhil, and PhD here, with me—now a Professor at Berkeley. In our introduction, we talk about the contribution of people working on French to the wider general linguistics, if you like. And we tried very much there to include citing women as well as men. That was a conscious decision.

I’m a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, so I’m hugely committed to furthering women’s education. And that’s very much part of both my educational practice and my intellectual research activity.

Why do you think it’s taken this long for something this comprehensive on French, in English, to get published?

I think one of the things that comes out through the volume is that there are, in some areas at least, distinct Anglophone and Francophone traditions of doing research. One of the things that we wanted to do was to try and showcase the best of both. There are certain areas of French linguistics, important key figures, whom Anglophone researchers often don’t know about, and vice versa. People in the UK and in Canada, I think, are in a good position to be a kind of bridge between those two traditions, and that again was something that we tried to do in the book. •