Sociophonetics of phonotactic phenomena in French

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the behaviour of 5 phonotactic phenomena in French, which have been shown to be rather sensitive to regional and/or stylistic variation: schwa deletion at the initial of polysyllabic words and in monosyllabic grammatical words, liaison, deletion of final postobstruent /l/ and /R/ and of /l/ in the 3 personal clitic subject pronoun ‘il’. The analysis is performed on a 13-hour speech corpus, labelled at different levels and including productions of 120 speakers originated from 3 French-speaking countries (Belgium, France and Switzerland) and recorded in two different tasks (reading and conversation). Beside the regional and stylistic variables, parameters such as speakers’ age and socioeconomic status are also taken into account. The results of the analysis show that the 5 phenomena are mostly dependent on the speaking style, but that the effects of the other variables is less relevant than expected.