Introduction

This paper will discuss the vowel phonology of Montreal French, based on the results of perceptual and acoustic analysis of a large corpus of Montreal French casual interviews (Sankoff and Sankoff 1973; Thibault and Vincent 1990; Cedergren et al. 1992). One underlying assumption behind this study is that language variation and change can efficiently be analyzed from the casual speech of a large number of speakers from different subgroups within a community. Another assumption is that rules for vowel shifting (or other linguistic changes) which are found to operate in one speech community help formulate theoretical and cognitive components of their grammar, and, by extension, they help to determine the typological possibilities available for all human languages. The Montreal French data to be discussed are especially interesting in that they provide evidence for sound changes that are systematically different from those which occur in English dialects (Labov 1991, 1983, and references cited there), or other languages (Labov et al. 1972).

Three issues relevant to changes in this vowel system will be discussed

Each of these issues will be raised in turn; the perspective provided by the results of earlier studies will be outlined. Section 16.5 will describe the corpus, 16.6 will describe the analysis techniques, 16.7–8 provide discussion of the results, and conclusions will be presented in 16.9.