Nasal Vowel Deletion in Spoken French

In this article, we report on a previously undocumented case of vowel elision in which the vowel of the possessive determiner son is elided in liaison context, meaning the utterance son âge may surface as [snaʒ]. Framing our analysis through usage-based phonology, we find that this emergent trend, which is realized by younger speakers, only surfaces in certain lexical and phonotactic contexts. We conclude with a call for further investigation into this phenomenon as well as other elidable vowels in French, since it appears that the e-muet is not the only vowel that can be elided.