Michael D. Picone

Emeritus Professor of French and Linguistics

Education

  • Doctorat de 3e cycle, Sorbonne, Paris

Bio

Michael D. Picone’s publications and program of research encompass an assortment of lexicological, phonological, and language-contact topics, as well as contemporary and historical profiles of language use in Louisiana, in Alabama and elsewhere. He is author of Anglicisms, Neologisms and Dynamic French (1996), a detailed study of borrowings and other types of lexical creativity in the French of France. He is co-editor of the Dictionary of Louisiana French (2010) and co-editor of New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches (2015). Some of his most recent research revolves around nineteenth-century literary dialect in the South and linguistic and semiotic approaches to French bande dessinée and other comics and graphic novels.

Selected Publications

  • Teaching Franco-Belgian bande dessinée appeared in Teaching the Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick; New York: Modern Languages Association of America (2009).
  • He was a member of the editorial team whose Dictionary of Louisiana French as Spoken in Cajun, Creole and American Indian Communities was published by the University Press of Mississippi (2010) and is now in its third printing.
  • Comic Art in Museums and Museums in Comic Art appeared in the December 2013 issue of European Comic Art.
  • Cajun French and Louisiana Creole appeared in Languages and Dialects in the U.S.: Focus on Diversity and Linguistics, edited by Marianna Di Paolo and Arthur K. Spears; London and New York: Routledge (2014).
  • New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches, edited by Michael D. Picone and Catherine Evans Davies; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press (2015).
  • Eye Dialect and Pronunciation Respelling in the USA appeared in The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System, edited by Vivian Cook and Des Ryan; London and New York: Routledge (2016).
  • Language Variety in Louisiana: Research Trends and Implications appeared in Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation, edited by Jeffrey Reaser, Eric Wilbanks, Karissa Wojcik, and Walt Wolfram; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2018).
  • Multilingual Alabama, a historical overview of the languages spoken in Alabama (a revision of an earlier contribution that appeared in Tributaries, the journal of the Alabama Folklife Association, Issue No. 10, 2007/2008), will appear in Speaking of Alabama: The History, Diversity, Function, and Change of Language, edited by Thomas E, Nunnally; Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.