Accent levelling and accent localisation in northern French: Comparing Nancy and Rennes

Abstract

ab st rac tThis article addresses the contention that the regional accents of northern France have become increasingly uniform ('levelled') in recent decades. A qualitative, micro-level analysis is carried out on the speech of two older working-class male informants, one from each of the cities of Nancy and Rennes. To contextualise the data, which are drawn from sociolinguistic interviews, previous accounts of the relevant français régionaux are summarised. Close examination of non-standard features in the present data shows that whereas the Nancy informant displays several localised traits, the Rennes speaker's accent is more typical of general colloquial and lower-class usage. While regionally marked variants are disappearing, the degree of accent levelling varies according to region, and thus according to substrate dialect. i nt roduc t i onIn recent years, levelling of dialect and accent has become a focus of research and discussion amongst sociolinguists and dialectologists, notably with reference to British English (cf. for example Docherty, 1999a, 1999b;Watt and Milroy, 1999, who give a concise history of the study of levelling (p.

When perception isn't reality: Accent identification and perceptual dialectology in French

“…Again, this may be due to the fact that the regional component of their accent, if there is one (cf. Boughton, 2005), is not as divergent as for the Nancy speakers and so does not serve as an additional perceptual clue differentiating the class groups. Both Rennes class groups show similar, albeit mixed, perceptions of 'East'; the middle-class radar shows a stronger pull and bunching towards 'West' and 'Centre'/'Paris', though several working-class speakers are similarly perceived, and Figures 7 and 9 shows that the Nancy middle-class speakers are in fact more strongly associated with the 'standard' axes of 'West' and 'Centre'/'Paris' than those from Rennes.…”

Introduction. Phonétique, sociolinguistique, sociophonétique : histoires parallèles et croisements

“…Bien que relativement récentes, les investigations socioperceptives portant sur des traits phoniques précis gagnent l'intérêt des chercheurs qui étudient le français : citons Armstrong & Boughton (2000), Boughton (2006Boughton ( , 2005 Dans le domaine de la sociolinguistique ethnographique, la SoPho du français n'en est qu'à ses débuts : on peut citer la thèse d'Audrit (2009) sur un groupe de lycéennes bruxelloises issues de l'immigration magrébine. Il en est de même pour les apports de la linguistique de corpus et des méthodes de fouilles semi-automatique : Candea et al (2013) ou Torreira et al (2010) abordent certains aspects de la prononciation du français contemporain à partir de grandes masses de données conversationnelles ou radiodiffusées alignées mais cette voie de recherche reste entièrement à explorer.…”

Regional vocabulary leveling: The example of south‐eastern French

“…Britain is probably the most studied country along with Norway (Watt 2000; Kerswill 1996, 2002, 2003; Dyer 2002; Torgesen and Kerswill 2004; among many others) but other countries have also been described: Denmark (Pedersen 1996), Demark and Sweden (Kristensen and Thelander 1984), Spain (Hernández‐Campoy 2003), the United States (Fitzmaurice 2000) and Canada (D’Arcy 2005). Recently, drawing on a large body of studies on the disappearance or resistance of regional characteristics (see the contributions in Blanchet, Breton and Shiffman 1999 among others), Armstrong (2002) and Boughton (2005) have explored leveling in France. The current paper builds on this existing tradition, but differs from it by focusing on vocabulary and by including GoldVarb statistics in a Labovian approach.…”