A new perspective on the development of Quebec French rhotic vowels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quebec French is reportedly developing rhoticity, with low F3 resulting from a bunched or retroflexed tongue (like English /ɚ/), in some or all of the front mid rounded vowels /ø, œ, œ̃ /. The source of this rare, understudied sound change is unclear from previous work: contact with English and contrast enhancement have been suggested, and phonologization of coarticulation is typologically plausible. We examine this issue, investigating the apparent time change in the F3 trajectories of the three vowels using generalized additive mixed models on a corpus of parliamentary speech (108 speakers from across Quebec). We observe rhoticity in /ø/ and /œ̃ /: men begin with low F3 in these vowels, and women show change in progress. Conversely, there is less clear evidence of change in /œ/. We suggest these findings are best explained by analyzing rhotacization as a two-phased change, originally due to borrowing and subsequently spreading through contrast enhancement. Rhoticity, we argue, is the combined product of intensive exposure to English (which led to frequent nonintegration of bunched/retroflex segments in loanwords) and an exceptionally large vowel inventory. It thus results from the unique interplay of social and phonological factors in Quebec French, which is consistent with such changes being cross-linguistically rare.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".