French in Paris (Île-de-France)

Abstract

Historically, the higher circles of Paris have dictated the bon usage in French pronunciation, and have contributed to the present day Reference French; at the same time, howevr, Paris has preserved some local phonetic features, especially in lower social classes. The young man studied in this chapter is a PhD student, born to Parisian parents and raised in the 14th arrondissement. In the extract, his French is characterized by words from the familiar register (frigo, truc, sympa, clope) and by syntactic structures frequent in spontaneous spoken French (dislocations, clefts, ne-omission, etc.). On the phonetic level, he presents several features of Reference French (a reduced nasal vowel system, loss of /ɑ/, some tendencies towards the reduction of contrasts in mid vowels, three distinct high oral vowels, and an interconsonantal schwa which follows long-established rules). However, his palatalized /k/’s, and his prepausal schwa-tagging makes him sound specifically Parisian.

Near-Native Sociolinguistic Competence in French: Evidence from Variable Future-Time Expression

“…These forms maintain a spelling difference in the final morpheme, which reflects the fact that in the past there was a phonetic difference. Although the phonetic distinction can still occur in contemporary formal speech (e.g., Armstrong & Pooley, 2010;Hansen, 2016), this presentday homophony in informal speech means that we could not empirically distinguish firstperson singular IF and conditional forms in our oral data. The analysis of the IF thus excludes first-person singular forms.…”