A sociolinguistic study of the origins of ne deletion in European and Quebec French

We present and discuss the results of a sociolinguistic historical study of variable deletion of the preverbal negative particle ne 'not', a phenomenon observable in many contemporary varieties of spoken French, but which has not yet made its way into standard written French. Our study's two main goals are (i) to contribute to the resolution of a debate over the point in time when ne deletion became a prevalent feature of nonstandard spoken French, and (ii) to assess the role of the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns in the rise of ne deletion. Our study is based on the analysis of an extensive database comprising a wide range of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century sources providing information on the typical features of nonstandard spoken European and Quebec French. It reveals that ne deletion became widespread in nonstandard spoken French only in the nineteenth century and leads us to hypothesize that the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns contributed to the rise of tie deletion.*.