Phonological variation in French: Illustrations from three continents ed. by Randall Gess, Chantal Lyche, Trudel Meisenburg (review)

This informative volume presents the results of twelve surveys of diatopic and social variation in French pronunciation from the Phonologie du français contemporain project (PFC) (http://www.projet-pfc.net/). The book is divided into three sections representing the continents under study—(sub-Saharan) Africa, Europe, and North America—and within each section the chapters are structured similarly to place the variety in its sociohistorical context, to describe its segmental inventory, and to address how it is structured with respect to the array of phonological properties under study in the PFC. The sections are framed by an introduction that provides the essential background to this research endeavor and a concluding chapter that summarizes the major findings from the research analyzed. The chapters assembled in this book, written by familiar scholars in the field of French linguistics, provide an enticing glimpse of the wealth of variation that can be found in the sound system of French across and within these continents.

In the introduction, the editors, Randall Gess, Chantal Lyche, and Trudel Meisenburg, have produced an admirably concise description of the phonology of le français de référence (FR), a term selected to avoid normative connotations. They place special emphasis on the major points of variation that the PFC project is designed to sample for each location: the vowel inventory, schwa deletion, liaison realization, and prosody. This is followed by a description of the survey protocol and the data-coding procedures. The survey instruments, a word list and written text designed to elicit the features of interest to the project, are included as an appendix to the chapter.

The global tour of French variation begins in the continent of Africa with an illustration by Guri Bordal of French as spoken by Sango speakers in the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR). As in all of the survey points in Africa, French is embedded in a multilingual context where crosslinguistic influences are to be expected, and, indeed, Bordal makes the case explicitly that the lexical tones of Sango appear to be mapped onto French with the result that each word constitutes an independent prosodic unit with a fixed tonal pattern. Additionally, CAR French manifests consonant cluster simplification and vowel epenthesis, in order to avoid complex syllables that are partially banned in Sango. Vowel harmony, consonant palatalization, and a phonemic opposition between [e] and [ε] are realized in both FR and Sango, and all are maintained in the variety described.

In another multilingual region, Béatrice Akissi Boutin, Randall Gess, and Gabriel Marie Guèye have selected a variety of French spoken by Wolof speakers (FW) for illustration of the French spoken in Dakar. They describe a complex linguistic landscape where oral French is rarely used in speech unless it is code-mixed with Wolof. The case for contact-induced variation in FW appears straightforward here as well, most notably in a system of advanced tongue root vowel harmony that involves the mid front unrounded series and, to a much lesser degree, the back mid vowels. The vowel harmony process of FW appears to supersede the syllabic conditioning on mid vowel quality known as the loi de position that has at least a partial effect in all varieties of French. An aspect of FW that recurs in some of the other varieties of French under study in this project is the inaudibility of unreleased voiceless stops, which leads to final devoicing. Finally, the prosodic patterns of Wolof appear to transfer much in the same way as they do for French in contact in the CAR.

In the final chapter on Africa, Chantal Lyche and Ingse Skattum present French in Bamako, the capital city of Mali. Here, data from French speakers of five different local languages are analyzed. Given the diversity of...