La prosodie du "français fédéral". Étude de la vitesse d'articulation et de l'accentuation en français L1 et L2.

The aim of this study is to examine some prosodic features of a variety of L2 French commonly called "français fédéral", which is a variety of French spoken by people who have a Swiss German dialect as L1. We compared the data of 4 groups of 4 speakers: 2 groups of French native speakers (from Neuchâtel in Switzerland and from Paris) and 2 groups of 4 Swiss German French speakers (from Bern and Zurich but living in Neuchâtel for at least 20 years). The data were semi-automatically processed. We examined two prosodic properties: articulation rate and accentuation. Our findings suggest that: (i) native speakers from Paris articulate faster than native speakers from Neuchâtel; (ii) non-native speakers articulate as fast as the native speakers of the corresponding variety; (iii) "français fédéral" shares several features with a lexical accentuation system rather than with a supra-lexical accentuation system.