Pronouncing French names in New Orleans

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article, based on 984 interviews with bearers of French names in the city of New Orleans, investigates the use of the notion of pronunciation as a device by which speakers manage their talk. The investigation proceeded primarily by eliciting ways in which people employ devices for talking about talk in everyday communicative interactions, as a means to manage various types of communicational phenomena and to deal with communication difficulties emerging from a clash of phonetic traditions. The result is a definition of pronunciation in terms which are used by a majority of speakers. An appendix gives a list of names, with comments by their bearers concerning ways in which those bearers would attempt to convey to mispronouncers the correct pronunciation of their names. (Pronunciation, lay metalanguage, folk-linguistics, phonology, phonetics, New Orleans, French names)

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