Frenchville French: A case study in phonological attrition

Abstract

This paper investigates the phonetic and phonological properties of a contracting variety of French spoken in Frenchville, PA, a linguistic enclave community. Specifically, we analyze a pattern of convergence versus preservation that cannot be convincingly explained or understood given current proposals of the process of phonological convergence and attrition in a bilingual contact situation. We demonstrate that our speakers preserve some low level information while sacrificing other phonetic details. In the case under investigation, there is a gradient replacement of the French mid front rounded vowels with an English-like rhoticized schwa but our speakers maintain language specific, phonetically distinct rhotic consonants. We argue that the patterns of loss versus maintenance that emerge are not necessarily driven by the need to preserve contrastive features with a high functional load. Equally plausible accounts for these patterns may lie in acoustic salience, the sociolinguistic marking of identity, and competition between articulatory demands.