This article first summarises the state of the varieties of French spoken in Canada, the northern United States and Louisiana (number of speakers; majority, minority and bilingual communities; historical summary of colonisation).We then present each article of this volume by geographical region. A difference surfaces between the studies on Quebec French, mainly based on existing written and oral corpora, and the studies on Western and Louisiana French, centered on the gathering of new oral data. Furthermore, European linguists are mainly interested in the links between Acadia and Louisiana, while their Canadian colleagues focus more on the links between Quebec and the West or between Quebec and Acadia. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no research done on the historical links between Quebec and Louisiana, by way of the Mississippi, via the old French forts. By highlighting these less explored areas of research, we hope to arouse the interest of younger scholars.