The Reflection of Social Facts in Linguistic Awareness (original) (raw)
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We report on a pilot analysis of two speakers—M, 33, and F, 24, both middle-class—from Le Havre, France, part of the larger Towards A New Linguistic Atlas of France project. The aim is to isolate features to investigate in greater detail in the full analysis. Two vowel changes are analysed: the merger or separation of /a/ (as in patte /pat/ ‘paw’) and /ɑ/ (pâtes /pɑt/ ‘pasta’), and the fronting of /ɔ/. Most areas of France merge /a/ and /ɑ/ to /a/ [18, 24, 46], but some Normandy speakers separate them [21], as does the regional language Norman, the oral vowel system of which is very close to that of its sister language French [30]. Both speakers analysed here have significant word-list differences between /a/ and /ɑ/. The female speaker also has fronted /ɔ/, a well-known feature of modern informal French [3], but one which has not been found for Norman. The emerging picture is of an urban accent which combines regional features and more widespread urban ones, even among middle-class...
English "Standard" Pronunciations: A Study of Attitudes
Language, 1990
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(e) in Normandy: The sociolinguistics, phonology and phonetics of the Loi de Position
Journal of French Language Studies
ABSTRACTThis article uses the pronunciation of stressed Intonational Phrase-final /ε/ and /e/ in two communities in Normandy, France, to illustrate the convergence of two sociolinguistic processes on the same phonological result: increasing application of the Loi de Position. In both communities (one rural and further from Paris, one urban and closer to Paris), there is now no consistent community-wide phonetic distinction between the two phonemes in that environment. It is suggested that the Loi de Position is already widely applied in the rural site, but speakers are still conscious of the formal norm whereby it is not applied; for the urban site, apparent-time changes for this variable reflect changes in Parisian speech. The theoretical implications of the study concerning speakers’ organisation of their vowel-space, and concerning the increasing application of the Loi de Position in the French of France, are examined. These conclusions are reached by per-speaker analysis of F1 a...
This study is an investigation into sociolinguistic variation in a second language. More specifically, it is an investigation into the extent to which speakers of English as a second language acquire particular features of the variety of English they are exposed to. The speakers in question are Polish migrants, and the variety of English is that found in Manchester, a city in the North West of England. The research uses data gathered from 41 participants who have been inManchester for various lengths of time and who came to the UK for a wide range of reasons. The aim was to explore the extent to which local accent features are acquired by second language English speakers, and the linguistic and social factors which influence this acquisition. Methodologically, the research draws on practices from variationist sociolinguistics, but by using them in a second language context, the study has the additional aim of developing the link between these two areas of study. Four linguistic features were identified, on the basis of them each exhibiting local variants that differ from any pedagogical model of English the speakers will have been exposed to in Poland. All four demonstrated some degree of change towards the local variants in the speech of many of the participants, but to greatlydiffering degrees. Multiple regression analyses helped to determine which factors might be influencing the patterns of variation, with the social constraints of length of residence, level of English, gender, attitude, and identity among those believed to be playing a part. The thesis ends with a discussion exploring the implications of the findings in terms of existing and future research, and looks at how they might usefully be applied to situations outside that of academic linguistics.
Previous sociophonetic work suggested that an atypical prosodic pattern, namely a word-final sharp pitch fall, could characterise the French vernacular of youth living in working-class suburbs (the so-called "suburban accent"). A question we investigate in this study is whether the presence/absence of these prosodic patterns increases/decreases the perception of the suburban accent. Using prosody modification and re-synthesis, perceptual experiments were conducted. Results involving listeners from two French regions are rather robust. They show that utterances with (respectively without) high-low pitch falls are perceived as presenting a higher (resp. lower) degree of accentedness.