An Anthology of French and Francophone Singers, from A to Z, 2nd Edition: Singin' in French

French song is a vector of cultural, social, and stylistic values. Throughout the world, songs in the French language are used in the teaching of French: professors incorporate songs into the curriculum in order to illustrate differences of register and linguistic variation, as well as to raise lexical or grammatical questions. Every musical form has had an impact on the linguistic practices of our society. As a form of popular expression, song is a genre that has, in recent years, become the focus of serious academic scholarship and criticism. However, few linguists have paid attention to French song and its linguistic uses.

This richly illustrated mini-dictionary about French singers fills this gap by offering a collection of portraits of the greatest singers of the French language and how they have constructed the musical landscape in both France and the larger francophone community and the world as a whole. Through (re)discovering these classic and contemporary artists who contribute to the creation of the sonorous universe of the 20th and 21st centuries, the volume determines how these musical genres influence the French language and nourish our collective imagination. By plunging into francophone song, one can achieve a better understanding of the culture and the language of its speakers.

Dr Michaël Abecassis is a Senior Instructor in French and a College Lecturer at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on French Linguistics and Cinema. His publications include The Representation of Parisian Speech in the Cinema of the 1930s (2005) and Le français parléau XXIème siècle, in two volumes (2008) with Laure Ayosso and Elodie Vialleton, among others. He is the editor, with Marcelline Block, of French Cinema in Close-up: La vie d’un acteur pour moi (2015).

Marcelline Block’s publications include the Boston, Paris, Prague, Las Vegas and Marseille volumes of the World Film Locations series; Fan Phenomena: Marilyn Monroe (2015); and the first French-to-English translation of Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit’s Propaganda Documentaries in France, 1940-1944 (2016). She also co-edited Plurilingual Perspectives in Geolinguistics (second edition, 2016) and The Directory of World Cinema: Belgium (2014), among others. With Michaël Abecassis, she edited French Cinema in Close-up: La vie d’un acteur pour moi (2015).

Felicity Chaplin is Lecturer in European Languages (French) at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of two books, Charlotte Gainsbourg: transnational and transmedia stardom (2020) and La Parisienne in cinema: between art and life (2017), and is a contributor to the edited collections Refocus: The films of François Ozon (2021) and Remembering Paris in Text and Film (2021).

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Michaël Abecassis

Sophie Beaulé

Luc Bellemare

Soufiane Bengoua

Robin Benzrihem

Guilhem Billaudel

Jacek Blaszkiewicz

Marcelline Block

Olivier Bourderionnet

Lauren Carmé

Virginie Cassidy