A new perspective on the development of Quebec French rhotic vowels

Quebec French is reportedly developing rhoticity, with low F3 resulting from a bunched or retroflexed tongue (like English /ɚ/), in some or all of the front mid rounded vowels /ø, œ, œ̃ /. The source of this rare, understudied sound change is unclear from previous work: contact with English and contrast enhancement have been suggested, and phonologization of coarticulation is typologically plausible. We examine this issue, investigating the apparent time change in the F3 trajectories of the three vowels using generalized additive mixed models on a corpus of parliamentary speech (108 speakers from across Quebec). We observe rhoticity in /ø/ and /œ̃ /: men begin with low F3 in these vowels, and women show change in progress. Conversely, there is less clear evidence of change in /œ/. We suggest these findings are best explained by analyzing rhotacization as a two-phased change, originally due to borrowing and subsequently spreading through contrast enhancement. Rhoticity, we argue, is the combined product of intensive exposure to English (which led to frequent nonintegration of bunched/retroflex segments in loanwords) and an exceptionally large vowel inventory. It thus results from the unique interplay of social and phonological factors in Quebec French, which is consistent with such changes being cross-linguistically rare.