Volume 26, Issue 2

A number of French words (mostly monosyllabic nouns) whose orthographies end in a consonant, e.g., but, mœurs, fait, are frequently heard pronounced both with and without that final element. A computer-assisted analysis of a corpus of 50 tape-recorded conversations with well-educated upper middle-class Parisians has revealed that the final consonant of these words is now generally pronounced in all contexts (utterance-final, prevocalic and preconsonantal). Variations in the frequency of occurrence of this phenomenon, as a function of a number of paralinguistic factors, such as age, sex, syllabic rate, degree of formality, etc., were also studied. The results were corroborated by questionnaires designed to reveal the awareness and the degree of acceptance of this phenomenon, on the part of a representative group of Frenchmen.