Rhythm Types and the Speech of Working-Class Youth in a Banlieue of Paris 119
Let us consider the case of allophonic variations in French. Glottal stops
as onset consonants, presumably left over from contact with heritage lan-
guages from North Africa in this corpus, are not altogether foreign to French:
vowel-initial words with emphatic phrase-initial accent (accent initial) can
have glottalized onsets, as in the often-quoted example of the single-word
utterance পIncroyable! ‘Incredible’ or another example from Léon’s (1993:
144) radio corpora: des documents পimportés ‘imported documents.’ “More
or less perceptually salient depending on the degree of emphasis”, Léon (ibid.)
notes, glottal stops are part of an arsenal of means (together with silent pauses
and accent initial) conveying emphasis by breaking the “expected linking
of [consecutive] vowels at the word boundary” (p. 144). If novelty is de¿ ned
as suggested in the Introduction, i.e., something new and not “recycled,”
than the novelty in the phonetic system of AF speakers in this corpus is not
the mere occurrence of glottal stops, but their contextual polymorphism:
in these speakers’ speech, glottal stops appeared in non-emphatic readings
of a text elicited in a school-like setting. In all but one case, EF speakers’
readings showed seamless linking of two adjacent vowels (enchaînement
vocalique). Unless one considers the unlikely case of speakers’ greater emo-
tional involvement in discourse triggering the realization of some onsets as
glottal stops, such segments are not bound to appear in middle-class variet-
ies of Parisian French, and they remain unattested in working-class varieties
(français populaire).
Vowel devoicing shows a different type of remotivation, and could have
even more important implications, as it could be a contributing factor in pro-
sodic change, whose phonetic underpinnings in languages have so far been
“only dimly perceived” (Labov 2001: 12). Devoicing has been shown to occur
in open and closed syllables in Northern Metropolitan varieties of French,
but only in word-¿ nal positions (Fagyal and Moisset 1999, Smith 2003).
As Smith (2003: 177) points out, this is a relatively atypical phenomenon:
“From a cross-linguistic perspective, the distribution of devoicing in French
is unusual. Final position is prosodically prominent in French, whereas in
many languages devoicing is a form of vowel reduction associated with lack
of prominence.” As a relative novelty, bilingual heritage speakers in this
corpus applied devoicing word-initially and word-¿ nally, regardless of the
type of syllable. Thus, contrary to the laxing and devoicing of high vow-
els that occurs word-medially in unaccented positions in Canadian French
(see Martin 2004), vowel reduction occurred in metrically strong prosodic
positions in AF speakers’ speech.^39 One can speculate that such joint pat-
terns of devoicing, if spread beyond the speakers’ inter-language, can have
important implications for the future development of the accentual system.