The Phonologie du français contemporain project in Quebec

Abstract

This chapter presents the PFC-Quebec corpus (440 speakers, 400+ hours of recordings) of French spoken in Quebec, especially its Laurentian variety. After a brief overview of Quebec’s geolinguistic research, it discusses the methodological adjustments adopted in the application of the general PFC (Phonologie du français contemporain) protocol to a specific variety that diverges in many respects from the French spoken in other areas. The relevance and potential of this corpus is illustrated by a dialectometric analysis of a small number of words whose pronunciation is subject to geolinguistic variation within Quebec. The data reveal quite complex geophonological structures and largely, but not completely, converge with the self-representation data from Avanzi and Thibault (2020).