Identification of regional accents in Fre

This article is dedicated to the perceptual identification of French varieties by listeners from the surroundings of Paris and Marseilles. It is based on the geographical localization of about forty speakers from 6 Francophone regions: Normandy, Vendee, Romand Switzerland, Languedoc and the Basque Country. Contrary to the speech type (read or spontaneous speech) and the listeners’ region of origin, the speakers’ degree of accentedness has a major effect and interacts with the speakers’ age. The origin of the oldest speakers (who have the strongest accent according to Paris listeners’ judgments) is better recognized than the origin of the youngest speakers. However confusions are frequent among the Southern varieties. On the whole, three accents can be distinguished (by clustering and multidimensional scaling techniques): Northern French, Southern French and Romand Swiss.