Accents de banlieue: aspects prosodiques du français populaire en contact avec les langues de l'immigration by Zsuzsanna Fagyal (review)

cognitive des représentations référentielles” (13). We must also take into account, however, the fact that the study is essentially a revised doctoral thesis. Demol’s research is based on multiple examples drawn from fairly recent issues of Le Monde; 1,700 examples seem sufficient to allow the author to make reasonably definite statements. Both types of anaphora—forward- and backward-looking— are analyzed in the lengthy mid-text chapter entitled “Caractéristiques syntaxiques et lexicales de IL et CELUI-CI anaphoriques,” plus the very important chapter 8, “Synthèse: pour une hiérarchie des facteurs.” The main subject may not be of intense interest to the average teacher, but providing multiple examples in a normal learning context can be pedagogically useful. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Fred M. Jenkins FAGYAL, ZSUZSANNA. Accents de banlieue: aspects prosodiques du français populaire en contact avec les langues de l’immigration. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010. ISBN 978-2-29612516 -2. Pp. 214. 20,50 a. The varieties of French spoken in the multi-ethnic suburbs of large cities in France have attracted considerable attention due to the presence of features such as verlan in the usage of young adults. Another characteristic trait of these varieties is their rhythm, which has been described as irregular, staccato, and speedé. Fagyal’s study is a highly original piece of empirical research about rhythmic differences in these varieties. It is informed by two frameworks: variationist sociolinguistics, especially sociophonetics, as developed by Labov and others, and phonostylistique, in the tradition of Fónagy and Léon. Fagyal tries to show that the phonetic features associated with these suburban varieties are “bien moins singulières qu’on ne le croirait” (64). The research was carried out in a working-class suburb of Paris that has a large number of immigrant families and their descendants, many of whom continue to preserve their heritage languages. Participants are two groups of boys between eleven and fourteen years of age: the français maghrébin (FM) group is made up of Arabic-French youth whose dominant language is French but who also speak Arabic; the français européen (FE) group is composed of monolingual French speakers who grew up in the same suburb. The study follows two complementary paths that are based on acoustic phonetic analyses of natural speech data. The first series of analyses examines rhythm, using global quantitative measures called rhythm metrics. These indices are calculated from the durations of vocalic and consonantal sequences, and they can distinguish among stress-timed languages (such as English or Arabic), syllabletimed languages (like French) and mora-timed languages (Japanese). The hypothesis that the FM speakers, whose speech rhythm is perceived to be ‘irregular,’ have indices that approach those of stress-timed languages is not supported. In fact, there are few differences between FM and FE groups: the indices of FM speakers are very close to those of FE speakers, and they clearly place these speakers with the syllable-timed languages. Fagyal should have reported statistical tests of between -group differences to underscore this important result. Nevertheless, her conclusion is a perceptive one: researchers who work with global rhythm metrics should not neglect sub-phonemic segmental information in their study of speech rhythm. One also gleans from her results that certain rhythm indices may be neutralizing social differences among speakers. In the second series of analyses, Fagyal Reviews 433 examines segmental features that can potentially influence speech rhythm, paying attention to phonetic transfer from the heritage language. FM speakers display several relevant phonetic processes, including glottal stop insertion in syllable onsets and vowel devoicing in word-initial syllables. Regrettably, however, the number of occurrences of these processes in the speech data is too small to offer a statistically meaningful correlation between social features and phonetic variables . Instead, Fagyal suggests social and stylistic meanings indexed by these processes. For example, glottal stop insertion breaks up the smooth linking between vowels (enchaînement vocalique) found in French. The glottal stop is a phonemic element of Arabic that has become an allophonic feature of French spoken by Arabic speakers; it is widespread among the members of the FM group. The observation that one member...