A new milestone for the study of variation in Montréal French: The Hochelaga-Maisonneuve sociolinguistic survey

This article introduces the 2012 Montréal FRAN-HOMA corpus, collected in the Francophone neighborhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, and how it relates to the heritage corpora of Montréal French collected since the 1970s. We discuss the methodological choices made regarding the composition of this corpus including the historical and demo-linguistic information that led to the selection of the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood for fieldwork. A presentation of the socially stratified sample and criteria for participant selection is followed by a discussion on data collection and the sociolinguistic interview. After a brief review of the transcription protocol and the advantages of audio-aligned transcription, we provide two illustrations of the revival of research on linguistic variation made possible by this new corpus.