Identification of Southern French accent based on suprasegmental elements

This work focuses on the identification of two different varieties of French on the basis of suprasegmental elements. More precisely, we will show that a perceptual discrimination between Southern French (spoken in the Marseilles area) and a more neutral French (which can be assimilated to standard French) is possible using prosodic cues alone. For this, we used a low-pass filter adapted to each speaker. As these results show the importance of the suprasegmental elements of Marseilles French, we investigated a preliminary research of the prosodic parameters of the corpus. This first investigation enabled us to draw certain trends of this regional accent which will further be discussed. 1