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Language contact and contextual nasalization in Louisiana French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2016

Darcie Blainey
Darcie Blainey*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
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Abstract

This paper examines variation in Louisiana French nasalized vowels across two time periods: 1977 and 2010–2011. Non-contrastive nasal vowels are typical of English, while contrastive nasal vowels are typical of French. Louisiana French is an endangered language variety. Instead of simplifying to a single type of vowel nasality, as might be expected in a situation of heavy language contact and language shift, Louisiana French maintains a system of phonetic and phonemic nasal vowels. Digitized interviews with 32 native speakers from lower Lafourche Parish provide 2801 data points for analysis. In contrast with previous assertions in the literature, quantitative analyses reveal that contextual nasalization operates almost exclusively within the domain of the word, not the syllable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 63 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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