Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T00:37:20.842Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prosodic rhythm, cultural background, and interaction in adolescent urban vernaculars in Paris: case studies and comparisons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2018

ZSUZSANNA FAGYAL  and
EIVIND TORGERSEN
ZSUZSANNA FAGYAL
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
EIVIND TORGERSEN
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article presents the results of a corpus study of prosodic rhythm in the urban vernaculars of 24 female and male adolescents featured in the MPF corpus (Gardner-Chloros et al., 2014). Using canonical rhythm metrics, among them the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI), we show that there is no clear effect of gender and only a small effect of cultural background on the variability of adjacent vocalic and consonantal duration intervals, typically correlated with more or less syllable-timed rhythm. However, female and male teens with multicultural background who clearly dominated their conversational exchanges with their peers and also used multiple phonetic features attributed to adolescent urban-vernaculars in French tended to show more variability in interval durations, pointing to more stress-timed rhythm. We discuss these findings in comparison with other urban contact varieties in Europe and North America. We speculate that rather than the leveling of phonological contrasts, as in London English, or societal pressures to conform to monolingual norms, as in French spoken in minority contexts in Ontario, Canada, rhythm-type differences in the present corpus are tied to speakers’ allophonic repertoires and best thought of as elements of interactional styles.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 28 , Special Issue 2: Multicultural youth vernaculars in Paris and urban France , July 2018 , pp. 165 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arvaniti, A. (2009). Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm. Phonetica, 66.1: 46–63.Google Scholar
Avanzi, M., Obin, N., Bordal, G. and Bardiaux, A. (2012). Speech prosody of French regional varieties. In: Quiuwu, M., Ding, H. and Hirst, D. (eds), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 6. Shanghai, China, submission 77, free access at: http://www.isle.illinois.edu/sprosig/sp2012/.Google Scholar
Berns, J. (2013). Friction between Phonetics and Phonology: The Status of Affricates. PhD dissertation. Radboud: Universiteit Nijmegen. Free access as: http://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/340_fulltext.pdf.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S., and Torgersen, E. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15.2: 151–196.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., Nortier, J. and Adger, D. (2015). Emerging multiethnolects in Europe. OPAL #33 Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London, UK, 1–27.Google Scholar
Clyne, M. (2000). Lingua franca and ethnolects in Europe and beyond. Sociolinguistica, 14: 83–89.Google Scholar
Dekhissi, L. (2016). Qu'est-ce t'as été te mêler de ça?! Une « nouvelle » structure pour les questions rhétoriques conflictuelles. Journal of French Language Studies, 26.2: 279–298.Google Scholar
Fagyal, Z. (2010a). Accents de banlieues: Aspects prosodiques du français populaire en contact avec les langues de l'immigration. Paris: L'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Fagyal, Z. (2010b). Rhythm types and the speech of working-class youth in a banlieue of Paris: the role of vowel elision and devoicing. In: Preston, D. R. and Niedzielski, N. (eds), A Reader in Sociophonetics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 91–132.Google Scholar
Fagyal, Z. and Stewart, C. (2011). Prosodic style-shifting in preadolescent peer-group interactions in a working-class suburb of Paris. In: Kern, F. and Selting, M. (eds), Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 75–99.Google Scholar
Gardner-Chloros, P., Cheshire, J., and Secova, M. (2014). Multicultural Paris French (MPF), http://www.mle-mpf.bbk.ac.uk/Data.html.Google Scholar
Goldman, J-P. 2011. EasyAlign: an automatic phonetic alignment tool under Praat. Proceedings of InterSpeech, Firenze, Italy; freeware and accessible online at: http://latlcui.unige.ch/phonetique/easyalign.phpGoogle Scholar
Grabe, E. and Low, E. L. (2002). Durational variability in speech and the rhythm class hypothesis. In: Warner, N. and Gussenhoven, C. (eds), Papers in Laboratory Phonology 7. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 515–546.Google Scholar
Hansen, G. F. and Pharao, N. (2010). Prosody in the Copenhagen Multiethnolect. In: Quist, P. and Svendsen, B. A. (eds), Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 79–95.Google Scholar
Hinskens, P. (2011). Emerging Moroccan and Turkish varieties of Dutch: Ethnolects or ethnic styles? In: Kern, F. and Selting, M. (eds), Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 101–129.Google Scholar
Kaminskaïa, S., Tennant, J. and Russell, A. (2016). Prosodic rhythm in Ontario French. Journal of French Language Studies, 26.3: 183–208.Google Scholar
Kern, F. and Selting, M. (eds). (2011). Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 75–99.Google Scholar
Kerswill, P. and Sebba, M. (2011). From London Jamaican to British youth language: The transformation of a Caribbean post-creole repertoire into a new Multicultural London English. Proceedings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Summer Conference, Accra, Ghana. Free access at: http://www.uni-giessen.de/faculties/f05/engl/ling/confs/spcl/home/docs/ker_seb2.Google Scholar
Low, E. L., Grabe, E. and Nolan, F. (2000). Quantitative characterizations of speech rhythm: Syllable-timing in Singapore English. Language and Speech, 43.4: 377–401.Google Scholar
Neuman, M. and Wu, A. (2011). “Do you sound Asian when you speak English?” Racial identification and voice in Chinese and Korean Americans’ English. American Speech, 86.2: 152–178.Google Scholar
Nortier, J. and Svendsen, B. A. (eds) (2015). Language, Youth, and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Obin, N., Avanzi, M., Bordal, G. and Bardiaux, A. (2012). Regional variations of speech rhythm in French: in search of lost times. In: Ma, Q., Ding, H. and Hirst, D. (eds), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 6. Shanghai, China, submission 224, free access at: http://www.isle.illinois.edu/sprosig/sp2012/.Google Scholar
Prieto, P., del Mar Vanrell, M., Astruc, L., Payne, E. and Post, B. (2012). Phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm. Evidence from Catalan, English, and Spanish. Speech Communication, 54: 681–702.Google Scholar
Quist, P. (2008). Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: language variety and stylistic practice. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12.1–2: 43–61.Google Scholar
Rampton, B. (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In: Nortier, J. and Svendsen, B. A. (eds), Language, Youth, and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–44.Google Scholar
Szakay, A. (2008). Social networks and the perceptual relevance of rhythm in Maori English: A New Zealand Case Study. Gorman, In K. (ed.), U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 14.2: Papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation 36, pp. 148–156.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. R. and Carter, P. M. (2006). Prosodic rhythm and African American English. English World-Wide, 27.3: 331–355.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. R. (2011). Sociophonetics: An Introduction. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Torgersen, E. N. and Szakay, A. (2012). An investigation of speech rhythm in London English. Lingua, 122.7: 822–840.Google Scholar
Trimaille, C., Candea, M. and Lehka-Lemarchand, I. (2012). Existe-t-il une signification sociale stable et univoque de la palatalisation/affrication en français? Étude sur la perception de variantes non standard. SHS Web of Conferences. Paris: EDP Sciences, vol. 1, pp. 2249–2262. Free access at: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00766763/document.Google Scholar