Southern vibes? On rhythmic features of (Midi) French

Abstract

One of the characteristic features of Midi French, probably stemming from contact with Occitan, is the massive presence of schwa vowels that tend to be deleted in Northern French. To establish whether this extra vowel causes the Southern varieties of French to be even more syllable-timed than the close-to-standard Northern ones, different parameters of rhythm metrics have been applied to stretches of spontaneous and read speech, recorded in Southern and Northern French, as well as in Occitan. Since the results display extensive variability in all computed scores, they do not corroborate our hypothesis, but rather challenge the assumption that French is a typical syllable-timed language.