Variation linguistique et signification sociale chez les jeunes Bruxelloises issues de l'immigration maghrébine : analyse socio-phonétique de trois variantes non standard
(2009)
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- Abstract
- (en) The present PhD research concerns three non-standard phonetic variants, known as specific to the adolescents from Moroccan immigration, and the meso-social meanings linked to these variants. The meso-social level is defined here as the profiles or social personae (Coupland 2001). My hypothesis is that macro-socially homogeneous speakers use non standard variants according to their belonging to contrasted meso-social profiles. This problem is tackled through the analysis of authentic data, collected during a one-year ethnographic survey inside of two Brussels schools. These schools had a mostly female and immigrated population. Among the two of them, a peer group constituting a community of practice (Eckert 2000, 2005) was chosen as the focus of the study. This ethnographic gathering of data has a double aim: (i) first, it has to allow to determine what the profiles specific to the investigated peer groups are; (ii) secondly, a long-term survey must allow to collect speech as close as possible of the speakers’ vernacular. The three non standard variants are the followings: (i) The reduced vowels: they are strongly reduced vowels that can completely disappear from the sound signal, in very atypical positions according to standard French. (ii) The back /A/: these realisations of /A/ are characterized by the backing of their articulation point, whose consequence is to move their timbre closer to this of /ɔ/ ; (iii) The marked variants of /r/: this large designation includes trill fricatives and fricatives produced with a large amount of noise. Analyzing the meso-social meaning of non standard variants requires a double methodology, both qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative part concerns the analysis of ethnographic data (interviews and fieldwork notes). It leads to the discovery of three contrasted speaker profiles, that is to say the messing-up girls, the provocatives and the modests. In the second part of the analysis, the existence of a link between the different speaker profiles and the use of each of the marked variants was investigated through statistical independence tests (chi square tests). These tests underline that the reduced vowels and the marked variants of /r/ are more used by the messing-up and the provocative girls, that is to say to speaker profiles which distance the traditional Moroccan and Muslim values. At the opposite, the back /A/ seem to have a double face, because they are linked with two very different profiles, the provocatives and the modests. This variant is also often mentioned as characteristic of the lower class language (Jamin 2005). It seems thus that the back /A/ have multiple meanings, whose point in common would be pejoration. If we come back to the initial hypothesis, the use of marked variants thus appears to be linked to the speakers’ belonging to contrasted profiles. However, these profiles are not the only factor to have an influence: the results of the tests show that, jointly to the profiles, the school has also an influence on the use of marked variants. This importance of school was furthermore underlined by several researches in sociology of education, where it is known as the school composition effect (Dumay & Dupriez 2005, 2008).
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Audrit, S. (2009). Variation linguistique et signification sociale chez les jeunes Bruxelloises issues de l’immigration maghrébine : analyse socio-phonétique de trois variantes non standard. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/128874