Vestiges of nous and the 1st person plural verb in informal spoken French

In informal spoken French the subject clitic nous and the 1st person plural (4th person) verb are almost entirely replaced by on and the 3rd person verb. Apart from a few contexts where the latter are not available as an alternative (cleft sentences with nous, disjunctive subject nous, 4th person imperatives, the discourse markers disons (que) and mettons), nous and the 4th person verb are found to occur at a rate of just 4.4% in a corpus of informal French. Posited semantic distinctions between nous and this use of on and the ambiguity of on are not insurmountable obstacles to a quantitative treatment of this variation. As has been found in Quebec French, the productive (though vestigial) use of nous and the 4th person verb is available as a stylistic resource for formal speech, and is likely to survive for the foreseeable future.