Variation in a rural village in southern France: Douzens

International audienceThis chapter offers an introduction to the study of phonological variation on the basis of a PFC survey of a small southern French village (Douzens, in Languedoc-Roussillon). The authors provide a database of ten speakers recorded using the PFC methodology, and show how it can be explored on the basis of the transcriptions and codings available in the PFC database. A number of areas are studied in detail: the simplification of consonant clusters, schwa deletion, and liaison. For each of these areas, variation is shown to be linked to parameters such as age, sex, occupation, and level of educational. The reader is systematically encouraged to double-check the investigation presented here against the Praat files and tools provided on the companion website to this book