Marc Chalier
Universität Wien, Austria

A perceptual-linguistic method to describe the standard of pronunciation of spoken French in Québec and Switzerland.

Keywords: Norms of pronunciation, Quebec French, Swiss French, Perception, Phonetics, Phonology, Sociolinguistics

In my paper, I will present a perceptive method, which I use in my PhD project to describe two non-dominant varieties of French on the level of pronunciation. This PhD project comes within the context of the pluricentrism of linguistic norms, which is actually one of the most disputed topics in variationist sociolinguistics (of romance languages). The situation of French is generally considered as an exception: Unlike other languages of great extension like English, Spanish, Portuguese or German, the variety of French spoken in France – and in the case of pronunciation, the variety of French spoken in Paris – is considered to be the undisputable norm for the French-speaking world. However, in contrast to this widely spread assumption, Quebec French has been subject to efforts of standardization for some years, which manifest themselves through a controversy about the ‘right’ norm for Quebec, mainly on the levels of lexis and pronunciation. The present PhD project is part of this controversy and extends it to three francophone regions. It explores the subject matter of the norms of pronunciation of French in a contrastive way for France, Quebec and French-speaking Switzerland on the basis of perceptive linguistics. The objective of this thesis is to describe the implicit norm of pronunciation of each studied region on the basis of the perceptive language attitudes and representations of their respective speakers. In other words, it shall be found out (1) which norm of pronunciation is preferred by each, the French, Canadian and Swiss speakers and (2) how these norms of pronunciation could be precisely defined on the phonetic-phonological level. These complex research questions require the use of mixed methods, which will be presented in this paper. My methodology is based on the pronunciation of the so-called ‘model speakers’ of the mass media, which can be considered as an implicit norm. Furthermore, the methodology can be divided in a production and a perception part. In the production part, the modalities of natural (open and guided interviews) and careful speech (reading texts and word lists) of these model speakers and recordings of the same speakers found in the mass media will be studied in order to make assumptions regarding the phonological features, which could be part of the endogenous norms. In a second phase, the extra-linguistic explanations of the hierarchization of these phonological features will be searched on the basis of two perceptive experiments, which are both based on natural and manipulated speech stimuli from the above mentioned production data. In addition to these perceptive experiments, a traditional sociolinguistic study on the language awareness will be made in each speech community in the form of a questionnaire on language attitudes and representations towards the norm(s) of pronunciation.