The regional accents of mainland France

1
The regional accents of mainland France

• What are they?
• How do we distinguish between them?
• Where are they found?

2
Common perceptions

• Little or no variation between regional accents
• http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1373908.st
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• So is this true?

3
How will we investigate this?

• 1) Find a word which may show variation
• 2) Listen for differences between regions
• 3) Compare accents
• 4) Suggest reasons for findings
• 5) Further investigate

p??izien
Parisienne

p?Xizen
4
Who says which?
We want to compare the regional accents of
Northern France and Southern France, and have
chosen Paris and Toulouse respectively to
investigate
And to show where these variations occur, we have
chosen a city in between Valence.
5
And then

• After finding a regional variation we hope to
  draw an isogloss to distinguish where the accent
  boundary exists.
• An isogloss is the geographical boundary of a
  certain linguistic feature.

6
You might recognise this sort of thing from
Jonnie
This isogloss shows the variation of the
pronunciation of the vowel sounds in words such
as cut, bus and but. KEY X ?
O
O
?
7
Methodology

• Record 5 minutes of French radio for each city
• - Paris Europe 1
• - Toulouse Sud Radio
• - Valence France Bleu Drôme Ardècke
• Write 10 examples of words which contain the
  ienne suffix for each region

8
Results Paris

• Parisians pronounced ienne in each example as
  ien
• Parisienne
• Quotidienne
• Humaniterienne
• Veriterienne
• Libanienne
• Veterinarienne
• Lourienne
• Minouscienne
• Matiscienne
• Poderrienne

9
Results Toulouse

• Speakers in Toulouse pronounced ienne as en
• Foudrienne
• Quotidienne
• Cartésienne
• Celibatairienne
• Toulousienne
• Végétarienne
• Comédienne
• Parisienne
• Arborienne
• Historienne

10
The Science of the distinct accents

• In Toulouse the vowel sound at the end of the
  suffix en is a diphthong gliding from /I/ to
  /e/.
• This means that the start of this sound is more
  fronted than the Parisian version ien.

11
Toulouse
Paris
12
Valence

• Speakers here used a mixture of both the Paris
  accent and that of Toulouse for the ienne
  suffix

i n en
Quotidienne Brechtienne Stellarienne Farrienesque Mordienne Rosenburgienne Jarretienne Toulousienne Parisienne Matonienne
13
Our ISOGLOSS!
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Whos the culprit? Well

• Theory 1 Occitan
• Romance language spoken in Italy, Southern
  France, Spain.
• Despite its decline, it has had a significant
  effect on the accent of those who originally
  spoke it.

15
Or

• Theory 2 Poverty
• We have found that increased poverty has forced
  communities to segregate into small groups,
  causing a development of a wider range of French
  usage (Translated from lAcademie Francaise).
• So, more time spent socialising in single small
  groups perhaps leads to more accents.

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So what have we discovered?

• There is a distinct accent difference between
  Northern and Southern France, which extend to
  Mid-France.
• It is unclear where this regional variation has
  come from.
• To be sure, we would have to form a corpus of
  regional spoken French, exploring this and more
  differences between accents.

17

• Thank you for watching

By Georgina Brown, Laurence Ashcroft, Natasha
Watts and Daniel Webb
With thanks to Billy Clark and Graeme Trousdale