Phonologic Structure and Social Factors in French: The Vowel "un"

Abstract

STANDARD HANDBOOKS of French phonetics recognize four nasal 'sounds': [ɛ], [œ],[a],and [ɔ], as illustrated by the utterances pin, lundi, pan, and pant. This traditional statement no doubt describes ac­curately what orthoepists like to call 'le parler des gens cultivés de Paris' but which, in the final analysis, is the normalized speech of the particular orthoepist himself. Recent observations of the pronunciation habits of a representative group of French speakers have led us to question the ade­ quacy of the traditional statement.1 In the present article we shall attempt a detailed phonologic analysis of the French nasal vowel system and answer two fundamental questions: (1) How many nasal vowel phonemes must be posited for French? (2) Within each individual phoneme, what latitude in articulation does the system allow the speakers?