Mid and Low Vowels in Southeastern French

Alain Thomas

In this article, we present the partial results of a survey of French pronunciationin southeastern France, where the local variants are more and more threatened bystandard French (SF). In order to document this process, we have gathered a corpus of French spoken in the Nice area; several generations of speakers are represented. It was thus possible to observe, in apparent time, the evolution of certain features of southeastern French (SEP) pronunciation, particularly mid and low vowels, which are the focus of this article. A Labovian analysis was undertaken to determine if the southeastern pronunciation features mentioned above are being lost and, if so, at what speed and according to which stylistic and sociolinguistic criteria.