Schwa-deletion in the Dialogues of 1930s French Films 1

Abstract

My aim in this article is to identify whether schwa deletion was a social or stylistic marker in the 1930’s. The videos and transcripts of five films provide the corpus on which this analysis is based: Fric-frac, Circonstances attenuantes, Le Jour se leve, La Regle du jeu and Hotel du Nord. Though these video recordings are samples of not natural but artificial language, these films are some of the only material available for linguistic analysis in that period beside radio broadcast and music hall songs. I will first quantify the deletion of schwa in word-initial position in the film dialogues and in a second stage focus on schwa-deletion in pre-consonantal “je” in order to establish whether these features of pronunciation can be used to differentiate the lower and upper group speeches.

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