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Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus
As France's second largest town and the European Capital of Culture in 2013, Marseille is well-known for what is considered the most famous accent in the country, the so-called "Marseille (working-class) accent", prototype of the "Southern" or "Provençal" accent and often opposed to a more affected or stiff "Parisian" accent (Kuiper, 2005). But beyond the traditional centre-periphery rivalry, internal conflicts in Marseille are revealing of more complex sociolinguistic issues. Previous studies have outlined the existence of at least three "accents" associated with specific areas of the town (Binisti and Gasquet-Cyrus 2003) and with different symbolic values already in conflict (Gasquet-Cyrus 2009). But very recently, urban policies aiming at the regeneration of the inner-city have attracted new inhabitants, whose socio-cultural and socioeconomic profiles unbalance the traditional sociolinguistic patterns. The emergence of a new category of city-dwellers, the "neo-Marseillais", associated with a "new way" of speaking challenging local customs, has shed light on new processes of perception, linguistic change and urban conflict.
Combining urban sociolinguistics (Calvet 1994; Gasquet-Cyrus 2004), critical sociolinguistics (Blommaert, 2005, 2010; Boutet and Heller, 2007) and ethnographic approaches these different urban language conflicts will be reviewed. Particular attention will be paid to the process of gentrification of space and its linguistic correlates, i.e. "gentrification of speech" (Trimaille and Gasquet-Cyrus 2013), and to the agonistic dimension of these contacts. Finally, the article will argue for a theoretical framework combining urban sociolinguistics and critical sociolinguistics in order to deal with issues of identity and power through the study of linguistic change and conflicts in urban setting.
