Rhoticity in Cajun French

Previous studies of Cajun French (CF) report a shift in pre-rhotic vowel quality (Conwell & Juilland 1963, Blainey 2015, Dubois & Noetzel 2005, Salmon 2007, Lyche, Meisenburg & Gess 2012). This is unsurprising, in that such behavior is reported for numerous Francophone varieties, but prior work on rhotics in CF has been largely impressionistic. As such, the current study presents acoustic analysis of pre-rhotic vowels in CF. Formant measurements were taken from data collected from three native speakers. The question of whether rhotic deletion is present in CF is also addressed: /r/-dropping is widely attested cross-linguistically, and has been reported in the closely related Francophone variety of Acadian French (Cichocki 2012, 2006). Given the previous literature on /r/-dropping and rhoticity in CF and other Francophone varieties, it was expected that these data would show variable /r/ production, compensatory lengthening of vowels preceding a dropped /r/, and a general trend of /r/-induced vowel lowering. Results of this study confirm the presence of highly variable rhotic deletion, a lack of compensatory lengthening triggered by this deletion, a centralization effect of the rhotic on the quality of preceding vowels, and variable lowering of the third formant.