L'influence d'un séjour en milieu anglophone sur la prononciation des grandes marques de commerce par des locuteurs d'origine québécoise

The linguistic influence of a majority group upon the language of a minority has been the focus of many studies. Changes such as borrowings, phonetic variation, code switching or complete switch to the majority language are sometimes observed. Using two groups of French speakers, one living in a French monolingual setting and the other living in a bilingual setting, we performed a comparative study measuring the phonetic characteristic specific to the two groups. Using as a reference the francophones from a monolingual setting, we compared phenomena such as assibiliation, aspiration, diphthongs, nasalisation, final position consonants, changes in vowels, retroflex /r/ and stress with those of the group in a bilingual setting. The corpus was composed by having subjects read a text containing brand names such as Burger King, Alpine, Woolco, A&W, Pizza Hut, etc. It is well known that mass media have a prescriptive influence upon populations and this is sometimes revealed in the pronunciation of words. The selection of sounds of our study allows the evaluation of words influenced by the media and potentially known by the two groups.