Doctoral Dissertation Research: Structural differences between French and Picard: Evidence from phonetics and phonology

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

When should a dialect be considered a different language? Though French and the Picard language both developed from Latin, the political and linguistic unification of France has led to a decline in the use of Picard. Today, Picard is classified as "severely endangered" by UNESCO, and considerable uncertainty has been expressed regarding its independence as a separate language. At worst, it is labeled a corrupted dialect of French, but recent linguistic analyses have revealed both important structural differences and complexities in Picard. This project aims to expand that body of evidence with respect to nasality. Though the two languages share identical inventories of nasal and oral vowels, they are reported to display opposite patterns of regressive nasalization, i.e., where nasal airflow overlaps with a vowel before nasal consonants. Several phonetic studies have shown that this applies to high vowels /i, y, u/ in French, which have no nasal counterpart in either language. However, there is disagreement about whether this occurs at significant rates, and whether it is part of the phonological grammar of French or a minor phonetic reflex. Meanwhile, a major reference grammar of Picard reports that this process applies only to /a, e, o/, which do have nasal counterparts in both languages. However, in contrast with the French studies, there are no phonetic data for Picard to support these claims. Given the possibility that the French government might adopt policies that aim to increase its recognition and support for its regional languages and the general lack of empirical evidence concerning the languages that are most closely related to French, the proposed research is both urgent and extremely timely. Nasal acoustic energy will be measured to document which vowels undergo nasalization, and to what extent, in Picard, Standard French, and the regional French of Picardie. This project will offer not only a phonological analysis of an understudied language, but also a comparative analysis of two closely related languages. In addition, this study may reveal insights concerning structural relations among nasal vowels. By determining major phonological differences from low-level phonetic phenomena, this study will contribute objective criteria by which a full-fledged language may be distinguished from a dialect, and its methodology is easily adapted to any setting where similar work is needed.