Stephenville

The community of Stephenville on Newfoundland’s west coast was settled during the 19th century by Acadians from the Chéticamp (and Margaree) area and Îles de la Madeleine. Prior to the 1941 establishment of a U.S. air force base during World War II, there existed a vibrant, francophone village (1935 population, 936) which rapidly transformed into a predominantly anglophone small town (1956 population, 5910). One of our research goals has been to reconstruct as far as possible the pre-1941 tight-knit francophone speech community and its patterns of language use.

Our corpus comprises archival interviews for two men interviewed in 1964, born in 1891 and 1896, and ethnological interviews for a woman and a man interviewed in 1980, born in 1896 and 1897 respectively. We supplement this corpus with shorter 1980 interviews with seven remaining francophones born during the first quarter of the 20th century. By this point, most of the community’s francophones had relocated to the neighbouring community of Kippens since their original lands had been appropriated for the construction of the U.S. base. The air base did not close until 1966 and the 1940s-1960s saw an explosion of jobs for anglophones moving into the community, leading to rapid shift to English.

In our research, we compare the Stephenville data with data from our larger corpora for speakers of the same age range for Chéticamp, Îles de la Madeleine and L’Anse-à-Canards, the latter located nearby on the adjacent Port-au-Port peninsula. Similar traditions of daily living were found in these communities up until the 1940s. However, although the Stephenville interviews are mainly concerned with individuals’ past work and leisure activities and those of their family and forebears, they also focus on community and familial histories of language shift and on their remaining contexts for interaction in French, such as chance encounters with other ‘oldtimers’.

References :

Butler, G. R. (1995). Histoire et traditions orales des Franco-Acadiens de Terre-Neuve. Québec: Septentrion.