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INTRODUCTION
France has long been associated with linguistic purism. So widespread is this association that, to cite Paveau and Rosier, 'il est classique de faire de l'attitude puriste un trait typiquement français' (Paveau and Rosier, 2008: 37). Although this idea is widely held, it has not been empirically verified in any systematic way. Are French speakers in France really purist? On the one hand, the existence of the Académie française, the long history of linguistic laws and the existence of numerous bodies that attempt to implement these laws would appear to suggest that they are. These all relate to language usage at the official level. However, language at the non-official level, that is, the language use and attitudes of individual members of the speech community, is just as important if we are to understand linguistic purism in contemporary France. Are 'ordinary' speakers of French also purist? Does the language ideology that exists in France at the official level affect their linguistic consciousness? We may expect them to hold more purist attitudes towards their language than speakers in a country less associated with a strongly purist rhetoric, but is this actually the case? This article aims to determine whether or not the rhetoric around purism in France matches the reality, specifically at the level of individual speakers of French. An investigation of linguistic purism at this level has allowed us to test the hypothesis that speakers of French in France are very purist. A comparative investigation of linguistic purism amongst individual speakers in Quebec is also presented. If France really is the typical purist country, then we would expect French speakers in France to be more purist than those in Quebec, hence the additional (related) hypothesis: French speakers in France are more purist than French speakers in Quebec. These hypotheses are tested using the theoretical framework developed in George Thomas's Linguistic Purism (1991), which provides 'the first broadly comparative and cross-cultural study of purism' (Thomas, 1991: 2). Testing the hypotheses serves a dual purpose: it provides a comparative profile of purism at the individual level in France and Quebec but also allows Thomas's framework to be assessed for completeness and robustness and to be modified or...