A social study of address patterns in the dialogues of 1930s French films

The existence of early sound recording available on video constitutes very useful material for the study of spoken French. These sound archives enable us to study the evolution of language over the 20th century in a way that was not possible in earlier centuries. This article looks at the use of address forms in a 1930s corpus of French films. Its purpose is to investigate the rules that govern the usage of Vous and Tu between the lower and upper-group speakers and gauge whether they are different from today's rules. The five films investigated are of particular interest, as they present a caricature of the Parisian society where two broad groups interact for the purpose of the French comedy: the bourgeois characters whose language approximates the norm, as opposed to terms "les gens du peuple", stereotyping the Parisian vernacular of the 1930s.