A DIACHRONIC STUDY OF VOWEL HARMONY IN FRENCH BROADCAST SPEECH SINCE 1940

In French, vowel harmony (VH) has traditionally been described as an optional and highly variable process limited to the conversational speech. With the aim of going beyond usual impressionistic descriptions, we propose a quantitative study of the evolution of VH, in the broadcast speech since 1940. For each of harmonizing vowels (V1) ∈ {o, ɔ, e, ɛ}, the F1 was measured, according to the aperture of word-final full vowel (V2), in a 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news. Our analyses indicate that VH has been significantly present in French since the 1940s. Furthermore, our data suggests that it has experienced since then a decline in the degree of assimilation. We nevertheless tend to consider that the trend shown may be due to epoch-specific acoustic patterns in combination with a significant diachronic change