By (March 21, 2008)

UAlbany Professor's Language Research on Display

Professor Cynthia Fox’s exhibit Le français en Nouvelle-Angleterre/The French Language in New England: Notes from the Franco-American French Project will be on display during the month of April at the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (Weston Hall) at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. Fox is an associate professor of French in UAlbany’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

At the exhibit opening on April 2 at 4:15 p.m. in Weston Hall Room 10, Fox will offer a lecture on her work, “C’est pas mal la manière qu'on parlait:  Franco-American perspectives on the French language in New England.”

According to Fox, “The exhibit focuses on our findings about who uses French today, its role in the community, and the forces at play in the dynamic between the maintenance of French and the shift to English that has been going on over the last 50 years.” 

The exhibit presents the results of a multi-year, collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation in which 275 French speakers from eight communities in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were interviewed by researchers from the University at Albany and the University of Maine.