APERÇU DES CONCEPTIONS PORTANT SUR LE FRANÇAIS QUÉBÉCOIS ANTONIA CIOLAC Abstract. Quebec French is a variety of French that has divergent lexical features compared to common French, since it contains archaisms, regional words, borrowings and literal translations from Canadian English and American native languages, as well as certain own innovations. The above mentioned divergent features originate nowadays several attitudes and opinions concerning the question of whether Quebec French is a regional variety of French or a variey of French with a greater autonomy. If we accept the situation of a greater autonomy, then we admit that Quebec French should allow for Quebec speakers of French to express their own sociocultural and (socio)linguistic specific characteristics. Nevertheless, the issue under debate is so complex, that nowadays there has not been given any clear answer to this question yet and this issue goes on generating polemical discussions at present in Quebec. We illustrate in our article the present state of research concerning the debated issue. The answers that have been given until now imply several sociolinguistic parameters, such as, first of all, historical and social aspects to which Quebec French owes its birth and its development and to which it refers, and, second, sociocultural and sociolinguistic aspects that are associated with this idiom. We thus take into consideration three aspects that are linked to Quebec French: I. Sociolinguistic parameters (which contain: 1. Historical and social aspects; and: 2. Sociocultural and sociolinguistic aspects); II. Certain linguistic facts of great frequency (1. Phonetics 2. Morphology and syntax 3. Lexicon and semantics); III. Opinions concerning Quebec French. We make use of examples in order to illustrate the previously mentioned aspects. Le français québécois est une variété de français caractérisée par certains écarts par rapport au français de l’ancienne métropole : archaïsmes, régionalismes, emprunts et calques de l’anglais et des langues amérindiennes, ainsi que certaines innovations propres. Les écarts cités déterminent de nos jours de nombreux linguistes à se poser à juste titre la question de savoir si le français québécois est une variété régionale du français ou bien une variété de français autonome. Dans ce dernier cas, le français québécois devrait permettre aux Québécois francophones d’exprimer leurs spécificités socioculturelles et (socio)linguistiques. La complexité du problème fait qu’aujourd’hui on n’a pas encore donné de réponse claire à cette question et que le débat continue toujours de susciter des polémiques au Québec. RRL, LV, 3, p. 271–291, Bucureşti, 2010