Nigel Armstrong

Profile

I graduated with first-class honours in French from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1988, and was awarded a ESRC-funded PhD, on sociolinguistic variation in the language of French children and adolescents, at Newcastle in 1993. I was a member of staff in French at Leeds from 2000 to 2023, and am now retired from teaching.

Research interests

My research has focused on two related areas: social, regional and stylistic variation in French; and French–English translation, also looked at from the viewpoint of variation.  The two interests are exemplified by my publications Social and linguistic change in European French (with T. Pooley), and Translation, linguistics, culture.

Books

Social and stylistic variation in spoken French: a comparative approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001.

Editor, with K. Beeching and C. Bauvois, La langue française au féminin. Le sexe et le genre affectent-ils la variation linguistique ?. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001.

Translation, linguistics, culture. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005.

Editor, with F. Federici, Translating voices, translating regions. Rome: Aracne, 2006.

Editor, with K. Beeching and F. Gadet, Sociolinguistic variation in contemporary French. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009.

With T. Pooley: Social and linguistic change in European French. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

With I. Mackenzie: Standardization, ideology and linguistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Journal articles

With Z. Boughton: Absence de repères régionaux et relâchement de la prononciation, LINX [Revue des Linguistes de l’Université Paris-X Nanterre] 42 (1): 59–71, 2000.

Traits de prononciation variables en zone urbaine : comparaison entre le français et l’anglais, Cahiers de Sociolinguistique 6 : Sociolinguistique Urbaine. Variations linguistiques : images urbaines et sociales. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 99–110, 2001.

With C. Hogg: The Pollyanna principle in French: a study of variable lexis, Journal of Pragmatics 33 (11): 1757–85, 2001.

Variable deletion of French ne: a cross-stylistic perspective, Language Sciences 24 (2): 153–73, 2002.

With A. Smith: The influence of linguistic and social factors on the recent decline of French ne. Journal of French Language Studies 12 (1): 23–41, 2002.

Nivellement et standardisation en anglais et en français, Langage et Société 102: 5–32, 2002.

‘La variation en français à la lumière de la sociolinguistique’, in La Tribune Internationale des Langues Vivantes, No. 33. La prononciation du français dans sa variation, J. Durand, B. Laks and C. Lyche (eds), 24–30, Perros-Guirec: Anagrammes, 2003.

With C. Hogg: The Pollyanna Principle in English and French lexis: some results and issues of methodology, Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 9: 1–33, 200.

Voicing ‘The Simpsons’ from English into French: a story of variable success. Journal of Specialised Translation 2: 97–109, 2004.  http://www.jostrans.org/issue02/issue02toc.html

Le nivellement dialectal en anglais et en français : le jeu de facteurs perceptuels. Actes du Colloque ‘Identification des langues et des variétés dialectales par les humains et par les machines’ 109–114, Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, 2004. Also: http://www.limsi.fr/MIDL/index1.html

With P. Blanchet: The sociolinguistic situation of ‘contemporary dialects of French’ in France today: an overview of recent contributions on the dialectalisation of standard French, Journal of French Language Studies 16 (3): 251–275, 2006.

What kind of sociolinguistic variable is French mute-e?, Nottingham French Studies 46/2: 135–150, 2007.

With J. Low: C’est encoeur plus jeuli, le Mareuc: some evidence for the spread of /o/-fronting in French, Transactions of the Philological Society 106 (3): 432–55, 2008.

Les Français devant la ‘norme urbaine non méridionale’. Changement linguistique et identité sociale, in Normes identitaires et urbanisation – Des catégories discursives et des villes, G. Ledegen and T. Bulot (eds), Cahiers de Sociolinguistique 13, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 15–29, 2008.

With T. Pooley: Levelling, resistance and divergence in the pronunciation of English and French, Language Sciences 39: 141–150, 2013.

With I Mackenzie: On prescriptivism and ideology. Representaciones. Revista de Estudios sobre Representación en Arte, Ciencia y Filosofía, XI, 2: 24–57, 2016.

Zazie at 60: some linguistic considerations, Modern & Contemporary France, 47/2: 475-492, 2019.

Chapters in books

‘Variantes féminines, langue standard et mobilité socio-géographique’, in La langue française au féminin. Le sexe et le genre affectent-ils la variation linguistique ?, N. Armstrong, K. Beeching, C. Bauvois (eds), 37–52, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001.

‘The influence of spelling pronunciation in two areas of oïl French: an indication of social convergence?’, in French accents: phonological and sociolinguistic perspectives, M.-A. Hintze, A. Judge and T. Pooley (eds), 45–72, London: AFLS/CILT, 2001.

With M. Jamin: ‘Le français des banlieues: uniformity and discontinuity in the French of the Hexagon’, in French in and out of France: language policies, intercultural antagonisms and dialogues, K. Salhi (ed.), 107–136, Bern: Peter Lang, 2002.

‘Language’, in French popular culture: an introduction, H. Dauncey (ed.), 17–33, London: Arnold, 2003.

‘Translating “The Simpsons”: how popular is that?’, in Translating voices, translating regions, N. Armstrong and F. Federici (eds), 203–215, Rome: Aracne, 2006.

With Z. Boughton: ‘Perception and production in French dialect levelling’, in Sociolinguistic variation in contemporary French, K. Beeching, N. Armstrong and F. Gadet (eds), 9–24, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009.

‘Between you and I, how does French hypercorrection work?’, in T. Pooley and D. Lagorgette (eds), On linguistic change in French: socio-historical approaches. Studies in honour of R. Anthony Lodge, pp. 23–35. Chambéry: Editions de l'Université de Savoie, 2012.

‘Social and linguistic change in French: does popular culture mean popular language?’, in D. Holmes and D. Looseley (eds), Imagining the popular in contemporary French culture, pp. 194–229. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Hyperstyle variation in French: yet another exception culturelle?’, in D. Hornsby and M. Jones (eds), Language and social structure in urban France, pp. 81 –91, Oxford: Legenda, 2013.

‘Translation and culture’, in F. Sharifian (ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture, pp. 181–195, Routledge, 2015.

With K. Dawson: When (and why) is a variable not a variable?, in H. Tyne, M. Bilger, P. Cappeau and E. Guerin (eds), La variation en question(s), pp. 19–39. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2017.

Genre, style and culture in the translation into French of popular fiction, Australian Journal of Crime Fiction, 2017 (1), http://www.australiancrimefiction.com. Also in: C. Gregoriou, D. Platten and G. Sulis (eds), Retold, resold, transformed: Crime fiction in the global era.  Milan: Mimesis, 2019, pp. 25–43.

With I Mackenzie: ‘Speaker variables in Romance: when demography and ideology collide’, in W. Ayres-Bennett and J. Carruthers (eds), Manual of Romance sociolinguistics, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 173–196.

Bourdieu’s distinction: (translating) language as a means of expressing worldviews, in A. Glaz (ed.), Languages – Cultures – Worldviews. Focus on Translation, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 109–136.

Phonological variation and change in European French, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, 2021.

‘Age, gender, and social class’, in W. Ayres-Bennet and M. McLaughlin (eds), Oxford handbook of the French language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 315–334.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>