Phonetic change over the career: a case study

Abstract

This study is concerned with phonetic flexibility in adulthood. Through a longitudinal analysis of the speech of the public French speaker Michaëlle Jean, we explore the relationship between an individual’s phonetic characteristics and career path. We carried out an acoustic analysis of the contextual tense-lax split of the high vowels /i y u/, a phonetic feature of Quebec French that is not found in other French-speaking areas. Sixty-two recordings spanning three decades and divided into five different stages of the speaker’s career were considered. The results showed that Jean produced the tense-lax split as a journalist based in Quebec, but progressively suppressed it as her career became more international, after which a reversal of the trend was observed. Taken together, these results indicate that a certain phonetic flexibility is maintained over the lifespan, and that career is an influential external factor that could be more frequently considered in sociolinguistic studies. From a broader perspective, our study contributes to a better understanding of language use during social ageing, which has proven to be less linear than chronological ageing.