Varieties of Spoken French

This book examines the variation found in modern spoken French, based on the research programme 'Phonology of Contemporary French' (Phonologie du Francais Contemporain, PFC). Extensive data are drawn from all over the French-speaking world, including Algeria, Canada, Louisiana, Mauritius, and Switzerland. Although the principal focus is on differences in pronunciation, the authors also analyse the spoken language at all levels from sound to meaning. The book is accompanied by a website hosting audio-visual material for teaching purposes, data, and a variety of tools for working with corpora.

The first part of the book outlines some key concepts and approaches to the description of spoken French. Chapters in Part II are devoted to the study of individual samples of spoken French from all over the world, covering phonological and grammatical features as well as lexical and cultural aspects. The book's companion website provides a class-friendly ready-to-use multimedia version of these 17 chapters, as well as the sound files and full transcription for each extract. Part III looks at inter and intra-speaker variation: it begins with chapters that provide the methodological background to the study of phonological variation using databases, while in the second section authors present case studies of a number of PFC survey points, including Paris, the Central African Republic, and Quebec. Varieties of Spoken French will be an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and students of all aspects of French language and linguistics.

Sylvain Detey, Professor of Applied Linguistics and French Studies, Waseda University,Jacques Durand, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Toulouse Jean Jaures,Bernard Laks, Professor of Linguistics, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense,Chantal Lyche, Professor of French Linguistics, University of Oslo

Sylvain Detey is Professor of Applied Linguistics and French Studies at Waseda University, and was formerly Maitre de Conferences at the University of Rouen. His current research interests lie in the use of oral corpora for language education and the role of variation and multimodality in second language phonology acquisition. He is one of the coordinators of the research project Phonology of Contemporary French (Phonologie du Francais Contemporain, PFC) and co-editor of Les varietes du francais parle dans l'espace francophone. Ressources pour l'enseignement (2010).


Jacques Durand is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaures and an Emeritus Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His extensive publications are mainly in phonology (general and as applied to English and French). He is the co-founder of the PFC research project, editor of the OUP series 'The Phonology of the World's Languages' and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology (OUP 2014).


Bernard Laks is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense (Research Laboratory MoDyCo UMR 7114) and a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Until 2012, he was Vice President (Research) of that university and formerly a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). His research and extensive publications mainly address phonology, formal and cognitive linguistics, the history of linguistics, and cognitive sciences. He is the co-founder of the PFC research project.


Chantal Lyche is Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oslo. She has published widely on French phonology and is the co-founder of the PFC research project. Her research has focused most recently on varieties of French spoken outside France, particularly in Switzerland, Louisiana, Mauritius, and Africa. She is the co-author of a standard textbook on the phonology of French and is actively involved in the teaching of French as a foreign language.