French

INTRODUCTION

My breakdowns are structured around accent features and influences described by Knight-Thompson Speechwork, a 21st-century, skills-based approach to speech and accents that celebrates language diversity. KT Speechwork offers the “4 Ps” below as a framework for exploring many different facets of an accent:

    • PEOPLE. Who speaks with this accent? Where does this accent come from, historically? What common cultural elements might influence people’s manner of speaking?
    • POSTURE. What is the habitual shape of the vocal tract for speakers of the accent? We all have a habitual way of resting our mouths that allows us to move it into the speech actions of our accent as economically as possible. The posture of this accent might be different from your habitual one.
    • PRONUNCIATION. What are the sounds of this accent? I’ll be using both recordings and the International Phonetic Alphabet to describe speech actions and the sounds they produce. As you listen and read, listen with your mouth–can you make the shapes the speaker is making as you listen?
    • PROSODY. What are the musicality and rhythm of the accent like? What are the intonation, stress, and pitch patterns that speakers might use? This is the soul of the accent. We could nail the pronunciation, but it’s not a manner of speaking until we find how it flows.

 

PEOPLE

A Philosophy for Second-Language Accents

Acquiring the sounds of a second-language accent (an L2 accent) introduces new layers of complexity that we have not yet investigated while studying accents of natively spoken English. The posture, pronunciation, and prosody features a speaker uses when they speak English will be influenced by the sounds of their language of origin. And they will also be influenced by the dialect of English that the speaker first learned. Here’s what I mean, as it relates to French.

About 76 million people worldwide speak French as a first language (L1). Because of the colonial history of France and Belgium, it is an official language not just of France and other Western European countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, but is also frequently used in or is an official language of countries all over the globe, including (but definitely not limited to) Canada, Haiti, Madagascar, Cambodia, Laos, Niger, Chad, the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), Senegal, and Rwanda. Just as different English dialects sound very different from Standard British or Standard American, different French dialects vary widely. Parisian French is different from Québécois, which is different from the French spoken in Dakar. To complicate matters, when people learn a new language, they learn a specific dialect of that language. French speakers from Western Europe often learn British English rather than American English, so their pronunciation and prosody patterns will reflect the sounds of Standard British, accented by the sounds of their own native dialect of French. A Parisian who emigrates to London may speak an Estuary English dialect accented by the sounds of Parisian French, and a person from Dakar who emigrates to Atlanta may speak an American Southern dialect of English with a Senegalese French accent.

This is why primary sources—recordings of native speakers, not actors—are all the more critical when working on L2 accents. In order to create a character, you must both understand who the character is and also do research into the sounds of real people who reflect your character’s circumstances. You might not be able to find a primary source with exactly the same language-acquisition trajectory as your character, but what you can do is learn a little bit about the phonetics of their first language and make some educated guesses about how these sounds and prosody patterns might affect the character’s use of English. This guide outlines some very broad generalizations that you can use as a point of departure, as you begin to investigate both your character’s French dialect of origin and the English dialect they are speaking in the play.

 

Global Use of French
Dark Blue: Regions where French is the main language. Blue: Regions where French is an official language but not a majority native language. Light Blue: Regions where French is a second language. Green: Regions where French is a minority language

 

Listen to French Speakers

Here are some samples to give you a sense of the variety of French accents. The first two IDEA samples represent a fairly typical Continental French accent, and those following are of African speakers of French.

 

When will you use a French accent?

First, a caveat. L2 accents are less common in English-language plays and films than L1 English accents. From a bird’s eye view, it makes sense: writers explore what they know. English-language writers tend to write about native English-speaking characters. So, be aware that although there are many stories out there with a main character who speaks with an L2 accent, more often, you will find yourself using L2 accents in smaller roles. Some plays that include characters with French accents are below. Notice this list does not include plays about French characters set in France, like Les Misérables or French-language classics by Molière or Racine in translation in English. In theatrical convention, directors tend not to set a play in France with native French-speaking characters speaking English to each other with French accents. Often the convention is to do these plays in the native English accents of the actors, and allow the audience to suspend disbelief.

    • Boeing-Boeing, by Marc Camolettie, adapted to English by Beverley Cross (Continental)
    • Fallen Angels, by Noël Coward (Continental)
    • Belleville, by Amy Herzog (Senegalese)
    • Ruined, by Lynn Nottage (these characters speak the Lingala language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but may have influences of Belgian French as the country’s official language)
    • Red Light Winter, by Adam Rapp (an American character impersonates a Parisian character)
    • Henry V, by William Shakespeare (Continental)

 

Finally, A Reminder

Characters speaking English as a second language want to make English sounds. They aren’t trying to speak with a “foreign accent” or to use the sounds of their first language. However, like all speakers everywhere, they adopt fluency strategies to get sounds out more quickly, because the point, ultimately, is ease of communication. So, as always, let’s put the character’s intention for speaking moment to moment ahead of “sounding French.” You might, however, carefully select places where, because of the character’s intention in the moment, precision with language isn’t their first priority, and more sounds from their first language might come out. Your playwright will also give you some of those “errors” or adaptations from the first language in the syntax and vocabulary of your lines, and you can consider how accent choices support that.

 

POSTURE

General vocal tract posture: Think about shifting everything up and forward. The French language uses a lot of mask and nasal resonance, which means the velum is more active than in many American accents, and the jaw might feel slightly closer (or higher) than your starting vocal tract posture.

Sometimes filler or hesitation sounds like um and uh are useful for finding an accent’s posture. Here are some of the speaker in IDEA sample France-2’s filler sounds, first at normal speed, then slowed down:

At risk of cheesiness… imagine that the sommelier has just offered you the first sip of a fresh bottle of deep red, earthy Bordeaux wine to taste. That moment of cupping the wine on the front of the tongue, letting its flavors absorb: that’s a proxy for the French vocal tract posture.

    • jaw: raised and advanced
    • tongue: a lot of activity in the tongue tip. The tongue root probably isn’t retracted, as it might be for some Americans, but the back of the tongue does a lot of moving toward the velum, and its resting place might be closer to the velum than in an American mouth.
    • lip corners: the lips and cheeks have more fun in France—think about lip corners that are willing to protrude or round. The cheek muscles (buccinators!) might engage. Try pulling the insides of your cheeks subtly between your teeth, like a duck face for Insta. That’s the muscle.
      • Dialect coach Eric Singer shares this delightful YouTube video of a little French girl telling a very scary story about animals on a long trip. You can literally see her lip corners and cheeks engage: 
      • Here’s what Eric Singer has to say about this wee storyteller and vocal tract posture: https://www.eriksinger.com/blog/2016/9/6/pint-sized-accent-teachers

 

PRONUNCIATION

VOWELS

Lexical Sets & L2 Accents

To organize the vowel sounds I’m introducing, I’ll be using a tool called “lexical sets.” These sets, created by J.C. Wells, are lists of words that tend to share a vowel sound (for example, boat, although, and explosion are all in the GOAT set). For a full linguistic discussion of lexical sets, see Accents of English I: An Introduction by J.C. Wells (Cambridge University Press 1982). Or, for something geared specifically towards actors, check out Eric Armstrong’s (new!) open-source book, Lexical Sets for Actors. Or just google it! Believe it or not, the Wikipedia article on lexical sets will give you a decent introduction.

Lexical sets are a very useful tool for acquiring L1 English accents . . . but their use is a little more fungible for L2 accents. When we grow up learning a language as our first language, we develop deep-brain learning about the “rules” (or patterns) of that language’s grammar, syntax, and pronunciation. We might not be able to articulate those rules, but we follow them. Wells’s lexical sets rely on this deep-brain learning. I don’t really know why I know that boat and although need to share the same vowel sound, whether I’m speaking in an American English accent or an Australian English one, but I know it. Someone who speaks English as a second language might not have acquired this intuitive understanding of the language’s phonetics. This means that lexical sets are only a very rough guide for L2 accents; you don’t need to cleave to them religiously. There is a possibility, for example, that a French speaker might not intuitively know that the words race (the FACE set) and rice (the PRICE set) must have different vowel sounds. So we have some creative license for a character with an L2 accent to sometimes pronounce a word one way, and sometimes pronounce it differently.

 

French Vowel Substitutions

French speakers may substitute the closest approximation from the French language for English vowels. These substitutions don’t need to be consistent. The “mistakes” might only happen when the speaker isn’t particularly able to focus on pronunciation, in a heated moment, for example, or when they are speaking quickly.

Listen as the speaker from France-2 says, “take the shape,” first at regular speed, then slowed down. Both take and shape are in the FACE set; in take, she substitutes a French pure vowel, and in shape she lands slightly closer to the English diphthong, but with a closer off-glide.

take the shape: [teːk̚.d̪ə.ʃei̯p̚]

 

KIT → [iˑ]

The /ɪ/ phoneme isn’t heard in French, and so speakers may occasionally use its very close front unrounded neighbor, but perhaps half-long: [iˑ]. Or they might land somewhere between /ɪ/ and /i/: [i̞]. In this short clip, the speaker in France-2 substitutes [iˑ] in the words its, Paris, and English. In the word Africa, she’s closer to [ɪ].

 

TRAP → [a]

As /æ/ is not used in French, speakers may land on the more familiar vowel [a]. Listen for France-2’s man and the first syllable of Africa.

 

FOOT → [u]

The vowel /ʊ/ may shift further back, with more lip-rounding, producing [u]. In the clip, France-2 uses this sound in look and put.

 

STRUT → [ɐ]

The France-2 speaker seems to centralize /ʌ/, realizing it as [ɐ]. Listen for the first syllable of London in this sample.

 

LOT/CLOTH/THOUGHT → [o̞]

These sets are in flux in much of the English-speaking world, and differentiating between them bewilders a lot of Americans, especially those from the Midwest (by which I mean: me), who might use [ɑ] in all three sets. Since the speaker in France-2 learned British English, she sometimes follows the UK pattern of using [ɔ̹] in the THOUGHT set, and sometimes in CLOTH words as well, as in long in the clip. In LOT words, I hear her use something close to the French [o], perhaps lowered: [o̞]. Listen for drops and pot in the clip. But she isn’t consistent about which words she places in which set.

 

FACE → [eː] or [ei̯]

Diphthongs are less prevalent in Romance languages like French than in English, so French speakers might pronounce the onset without the offglide, creating the French monophthong: [eː], or they may offglide to a close vowel, producing: [ei̯]. Here’s take the shape in France-2 again.

 

PRICE → [ai̯]

In this diphthong, French speakers might offglide to a close vowel, producing: [ai̯]. France-2 does this in the phrase white light.

 

GOAT → [o]

The same phenomenon as in the FACE set may happen in the GOAT set, realized as a monophthong: [o]. Listen especially for the first instance of the word rainbow in the clip.

 

CONSONANTS

/r/ → [ɹ̈] or [ɻ]

The French language includes a uvular fricative: the back of the body of the tongue approaches the uvula, but only hangs out long enough to produce some brief air turbulence, either unvoiced or voiced: [χ, ʁ]. The speaker in France-2 doesn’t seem to substitute this sound for the English /ɹ/, which is produced with a “bunched” or “braced” tongue, but she tends to add some muscularity. I’m hearing something like a “hard /ɹ/”, [ɹ̈], especially when the /ɹ/ initiates a word or syllable. Listen in the clip to strike raindrops and rainbow.

When the /ɹ/ follows a vowel, I wonder if her tongue tip is getting involved, curling back, as in [ɻ]. Listen for color, arch, four years, works.

 

/t/ → [t̻]

For me, this consonant characterizes France-2’s accent even more than the “hard /ɹ/” above. She uses an unvoiced alveolar stop-plosive in all positions (starting a word, between vowels, and ending a word), which is characteristic of both the French language and some accents of British English. Americans, on the other hand, might voice or tap a /t/ that occurs between vowels, producing something like [d] or [ɾ]. This unvoiced consonant also does a lot for the prosody of the accent—listen in the clip to how France-2 uses a terminal /t/ to initiate the subsequent word, as in it‿was, at‿one end, part‿of my, that‿you always. In white light, find it, and pot, notice how she releases the final /t/ so strongly that there is almost a fricative on the release; I think this is also because she uses the blade rather than the tip of her tongue: [t̻].

 

Th-alveolarization or th-stopping

The dental fricatives /θ, ð/ do not appear in most European languages, and so French speakers might approximate them. Sometimes for /θ/, France-2, substitutes [s̪], as in the word path in the clip. For /ð/, usually when it initiates a word, like the, she uses the plosive [d̪], also dentalized. Listen for the word the in the clip, in the phrase in the air and when the sunlight. You may also hear French speakers substitute a voiced alveolar fricative: [z]. Neither of these substitutions happen every time. In the second clip, for example, in the phrase the problem, she uses [ð].

 

H-elision

The phoneme /h/ does not appear in French, and is challenging for many French speakers to find. I hear France-2 eliding it, meaning dropping it from the start of words without replacing it with a glottal stop [ʔ]. Listen to how she moves from the to horizon in the clip, or from beyond to his. Sometimes she uses a glottal fricative, perhaps with more breath: [h̤]. Listen for path high at the end of the clip.

 

Clear /l/

While /l/ after a vowel or at the end of a word or syllable tends to be dark in many American dialects, /l/ in any position in French is clear. By dark /l/, I mean that the back of the body of the tongue rises toward the velum. By clear /l/, I mean that the tongue tip meets the alveolar ridge and the front of the body of the tongue stays fairly relaxed. I’m hearing the clear /l/ pretty consistently in France-2. At the end of the clip, listen to the words global and general – she’s lengthening the vowel before the final /l/ to keep it clear, while an American might drop it entirely and use a syllabic [ɫ̩]. If the relaxation of the body of the tongue is tricky to find after a vowel, try it at the start of a word, as in the French word lycée at the beginning of this clip.

 

PROSODY

  • Syllabic stress. Some linguists write about French as having no fixed lexical stress: which syllable is stressed in a French word can depend on its context in the phrase or sentence. Often the final syllable in a phrase takes the stress. This means that native French speakers might not be consistent with English syllabic stress. For France-2, this tends to manifest in her giving more or less equal stress to each syllable in multisyllabic words. For me, this is the most important prosodic feature to play with, particularly if your playwright occasionally gives you lines where the grammar is non-standard—stress may slow phrases down in those moments.
  • In connected or fluent speech in English, we often use a terminal consonant to initiate the following word, particularly if it begins with a vowel. French uses this feature all the time, often lengthening the subsequent vowel. I love this example in France-2, where the [ŋ] in hang releases with a [ɡ] in hang around.