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#YouAreWhatYouTweetCHHH: Identity and fricative epithesis in French-language tweets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2022

Amanda Dalola Open the ORCID record for Amanda Dalola [Opens in a new window]
Amanda Dalola*
Affiliation:
Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Phrase-final fricative epithesis (PFFE), often indicated in informal writing with a final -h or -ch, e.g. beaucoup_h, oui_ch, is a sociophonetic variable of Hexagonal French in which utterance-final vowels give way to intense fricative-like whistles. Production research has found PFFE to be used at equal rates among men and women, and perception research has found that native French speakers perceive it to mark either formal speech or intense affect. This research furthers the special issue’s line of inquiry on French variation in forms of digital media by extending the analysis to a sociophonetic variable with a robust life on Twitter. The study compares the pragmatic value of tweets containing PFFE with previously described values and then examines interactions of gender, hostword phrasal location and lexical frequency on its realization. 96.8% of PFFE occurrences in the 2060-token corpus were classified into the pragmatic categories of Formality and Intense Affect. Results suggest that PFFE has become a salient enough sociophonetic variable that 21st-century French users represent it graphically in their tweets, however, its usage is structurally more permissive than in spoken language, signaling that it has taken on an iconic value in digital spaces.

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Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 32 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue (French Variation in Digital Media) , July 2022 , pp. 243 - 266
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank the audience of New Ways of Analyzing Variation 46 for comments on a previous version of this analysis, as well as Keiko Bridwell, Barbara E. Bullock, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Jeff Lamontagne, and three anonymous reviewers. Any remaining errors are my own.

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