The Norm of Spoken French in Quebec (and in Canada more Generally)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reviews the recent published data concerning the standard of pronunciation of spoken French in Quebec (and in Canada more generally). First, we describe the norm of pronunciation that was proposed by the Office de la langue francaise in the 1960s. We then discuss a more recent and generally accepted model, that of Radio-Canada, that is to say the pronunciation practiced by radio and television newscasters of the French-language national radio and television network. We briefly present the general pronunciation guidelines that the Societe Radio-Canada (SRC) has proposed and show that even though this pronunciation seems to have become the “norm” or “standard” for spoken French in both Quebec and Canada, the specific phonetic features proposed by the SRC are identical to those prescribed in the Dictionnaire de la prononciation francaise dans sa norme actuelle (Warnant 1987), which happens to be a Continental French dictionary and whose phonetic features are definitely “Parisian”. In the second part, we describe the results of two empirical studies dealing with the actual pronunciation practices of a number of Radio-Canada television newscasters, those of Cox (1998) and of Reinke (2005). We compare the features on which both researches agree as well as those on which they disagree and show that there exist a number of divergent points between the empirical data obtained and the hypothetical model proposed by the SRC. Our analysis concludes with a synthesis of those pronunciation features which seem to be common to all SRC newscasters and which are thus part of the “norm” as well as those that are still subject to some degree of variation and therefore not yet fixed by the “norm”. Finally, we briefly reflect on the place that should be given to this putative pan-Canadian French pronunciation norm in manuals of French in Canada, particularly those of French as a second language.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".