Nasal vowels in French loanwords in German: The effect of linguistic environment

This article describes the phonological treatment of nasal vowels in French loanwords in Standard German, including both northern and southern regional standards, in light of recent language contact theory, in particular Van Coetsem (Loan phonology and the two transfer types in language contact, Foris, 1988, A general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact, C. Winter, 2000). Based on the realizations reported in the major pronunciation dictionaries of Standard German, it is shown that in aural, as opposed to spelling-based loanwords, linguistic environment plays a determinant role. In particular, in non-contrastive, assimilatory environments before stops, there is no attempt at imitating the French nasal vowels which are fully adapted to native German oral vowel + nasal consonant sequences. In contrastive, non-assimilatory environments before fricatives (more generally, continuants) and in absolute word-final position, on the other hand, there is a more conscious attempt at imitating the French nasal vowels, although in the mouths of northern monolingual Germans, imitation fails and partial adaptation to native V[η] sequences results. It is argued that V[η] sequences come closest to nasal vowels, phonetically speaking, and represent an, albeit unsuccessful, attempt at imitation. Furthermore, the pronunciations listed in the dictionaries for words containing more than one nasal vowel in French suggest that successful imitation starts in word-final position. Both phonological and phonetic factors are suggested to account for the contextual differences. Lastly, it is shown that the synchronic continuum of realizations for nasal vowels in French loanwords in German corresponds to the successive stages typically found in the development of distinctive nasalization in languages.