A study was conducted of the Baie Sainte-Marie Acadian dialect, a particular form of the French language derived from the French spoken in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. The purpose of this study was to analyze and explain a certain number of morphosyntactic deviations from standard French, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The two questions of particular interest were: (1) the relative importance of the influence of the English and French systems, and (2) whether the deviations discovered were clearly and systematically structuring themselves. Four male and four female informants, representing two age groups (30 to 60 years of age, and over 60) recorded conversations with other Acadians. From the transcript, a corpus of 16,000 words was derived. The analysis concentrated on verbal and prepositional syntagma. Analysis of the data showed that: (1) there was a close correlation between the number of years of schooling and the number of deviations from standard French, and (2) most of the deviations were archaisms going back to the first half of the 17th century. The conclusion was drawn that the Acadian dialect is more archaic than anglicized as far as the source of the deviations is concerned. While the question of the self-structuring of the deviations proved to be more difficult to answer, the data furnished several examples of systematic simplification of the verbal morphology. (AMH)