Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 406

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Recent evolution of some non standard variants in French broadcast news

Authors: ADDA-DECKER, Martine (1); CANDEA, Maria (2); LAMEL, Lori (3)
Submitted by: CANDEA, Maria (Sorbonne nouvelle university, France)

This work in progress results from a collaboration in sociolinguistics and automatic speech recognition.

Two non standard pronunciation variant types in contemporary spoken French were selected,
whose distributions are controversial in the field of sociolinguistics, i.e.
1/ constrictive consonants as epithesis (so called “devoiced high vowels”) and
2/ affricated or palatalized plosive consonants /t, d/ before a subset of vowels.
Both are considered as non standard variants, but the first type seems to be associated with
middle class speakers when they are in a dominant position, while the second one tends to be associated
with working class speakers of immigrant descent, in formal or informal situations.

Recent publications suggest that pronunciation of journalists, in particular newsreaders,
are the closest model to what ordinary speakers consider “standard French”.
In order to study a potential spread of these non standard variants in so-called standard speech,
we explored the pronunciation of several French journalists over a period of almost 14 years.
We made use of already transcribed oral corpora, ESTER 1 and 2 (150 hours, 1998-2003) of broadcast news
as well as a small selection of news recorded in 2010 and 2011 (from the Quaero program) :
if a frequency increase of these non standard variants is noticed over the target period,
then this could provide highly valuable evidence for the hypothesis of an ongoing phonetic change,
along with a low level of speakers' awareness about these variants.

In order to investigate our 200h corpus, a (semi) automatic approach was used to facilitate
the processing : the speech recognition system developed by LIMSI-CNRS was used to align
the reference transcriptions with the audio data. By changing some parameters in the system
we were able to explore different system configurations (setups) ; a special manipulation
allowed to identify and to align automatically the unexpected constrictive consonants in final
position, after /i, y, e, u/ and the affricated pronunciation of /t, d/ before high vowels /i, y/.

This preliminary survey provides some clear tendencies in the evolution of the considered
sociolinguistic markers, in addition according to the sex of speakers, the channel and the period.
For example, in some data, frequency of constrictive consonants as epithesis is 10 times higher in
2011 than in 1998. This encourages the design of new approaches combining automatic speech processing
technologies and collections of relevant speech data for sociolinguistic investigations.

References

Candea M., in press, Au journal de RFI-chhh et dans d’autres émissions radiodiffusée-chhhs.
Les épithèses fricatives. Le discours et la langue, 3, Bruxelles.

Fagyal, Z., Moisset, C. 1999. Sound change and articulatory release: where and why are high vowels
devoiced in Parisian French. Proc. of the 14th ICPhS, (San Francisco), 309-312.

Gauvain JL., Lamel L., Adda G. 2002 “The LIMSI Broadcast News Transcription System,
” Speech Communication, vol. 37, 1-2, 89–109.

Vernet, M. & Trimaille, C. 2007, “Contribution à l'analyse de la palatalisation en français parlé
contemporain“, in Nottingham French Studies. Sociolinguistic Variation and Change in France,
Vol. 46, 2, 82-99.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Recent evolution of some non standard variants in French broadcast news