This study investigates the learning of Referential French by speakers of Acadian French at the university level. One difference between the two varieties lies in their use of auxiliaries in compound tenses. In Acadian French, avoir is used categorically in compound tenses with verbs of inherently directed motion and pronominal verbs, while Referential French uses être. A controlled-production task and an acceptability judgment task were administered to 80 speakers of New Brunswick Acadian French who were students at a francophone university in New Brunswick, 40 first-year students and 40 fourth-year students. Results show that, while there is still variability in the fourth-year students’ auxiliary use, their performance is significantly closer to Referential French than that of the first-year students.

We present a sociolinguistic analysis of the third person plural verbal suffix -ont in the variety of Acadian French spoken in the northeastern region of New Brunswick. The analysis shows that variation in the use of this traditional morpheme is conditioned by external factors and in particular by social network. In addition, retention of -ont is conditioned by an internal factor, as this suffix regularizes the singular/plural contrast in stems, and the 3SG/3PL contrast in verbal paradigms. The more -ont optimizes these contrasts, the greater the tendency to maintain this morpheme. Thus, forms such as i-pouvont, i-voulont, and i-buvont— which allow speakers to communicate their identity and social position within their speech community as well as to optimize the use of forms in the verb paradigms — have a greater probability of being retained than other forms that offer fewer benefits.

We examine the evolution and current use of the French discourse marker mais dame, whose usage was first attested in Metropolitan French early in the 19th century. This expression has since fallen into disuse, to the point that many present-day Metropolitan French speakers do not even know it. We first determine the discourse functions of mais dame in literary texts (comedies and farces) from the 19th century. We then consider the use of mais dame in naturally occurring discourse, from conversational and narrative discourse with Newfoundland Franco-Acadians—descendants in part of 19th-century immigrants from France who speak a conservative variety of the language — who use the marker frequently. We find that the 19th-century literary usages anticipate the use of mais dame in Newfoundland French. Moreover, we show that mais dame plays an important role as an evaluative marker in oral narration.