Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 407
Part of Session 101: Sociophonetic research in emerging varieties (Other abstracts in this session)
Could the affrication of plosive dental consonants be an ongoing process of phonetic change in French ?
Authors: CANDEA, Maria (1); TRIMAILLE, Cyril (2); LEHKA-LEMARCHAND, Iryna (3)
Submitted by: CANDEA, Maria (Sorbonne nouvelle university, France)
Previous sociophonetic studies (Jamin & al 2006) carried out in Marseille, one of the biggest cities of France, showed that slight or total affrication of plosive dental consonants /t, d/ before /i,y,j,ч/ is consistently and overtly stigmatized, associated with young people of immigrant descent. But it is also known that ethnic categorization is more salient than social membersiphs and tends to mask social classes in France, because among immigrants and their descendants there are more people from the working class than in the rest of the population (TeO survey, INSEE 2008).
Some transcriptions of affricated /t,d/, used to style (Rampton 1999) young and/or North African immigrant speakers, have actually been documented, which seems to reinforce the hypothesis that this could be an ongoing stereotyping process of the affricated pronounciation, due to its growing conscious perception.
Nevertheless, there is no serious linguistic evidence allowing to assert that these phonetic variants are due to the contact with the main languages of immigrant people ; furthermore, a very similar phenomenon of affrication has long been in standard canadian French.
In fact, our observations lead us to formulate another hypothesis, since we also found the presence of affrication in the speech of speakers with a high social and linguistic prestige (Trimaille 2008, Vernet & Trimaille 2007), like journalists of national radio and TV stations, but also actors in a recorded conversation from a manual of French as foreign language (by Hachette publishers). Our data suggest that, except in Marseille and its suburbs, affricated variants of /t,d/ did not reach a high level of awareness, since they are not perceived spontaneously and consciously by ordinary speakers. If our new hypothesis is true, we may be witnessing an ongoing phonetic change “from below” in contemporary French.
A perceptual experiment was conducted in four French cities (Paris, Grenoble, Lyon, Rouen) in order to determine whether or not affricated variants are used by listeners to evaluate and categorize speakers’ performances when they are asked to evaluate speakers’ acceptability as appropriate in formal contexts (broadcast news). Our results suggest that, for our subjects, affrication of /t,d/ is not part of the main criteria a speaker has to avoid to become a good newsreader.
If the negative stereotyping process does not progress from Marseille to the rest of France, affrication of /t,d/ could expand among legitimate speakers.
References
Jamin, M., Trimaille, C. & Gasquet-Cyrus, M. 2006, ”De la convergence dans la divergence: le cas des quartiers pluri-ethniques en France”, in Journal of French Language Studies, 16: 335-356.
Fonagy, I. 1989, “Le français change de visage?” in Revue Romane, 24: 225-254.
Rampton, B. 1999, “Styling the Other: Introduction”. Journal of sociolinguistics, 4: 421-427.
Trimaille, C. “Who’s not palatalising? Trying to understand the status of palatalised variants in French”, 8th Conference of the HDLS, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 6-8 November 2008.
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, Number 2, 82-99.