French Sound Structure

Ronald R. Henry is director of the School of Translators and
Interpreters at Laurentian University.

This book is a veritable model of clear, concise, and elegant writing on
a well-circumscribed topic. The superbly methodical manner in which the
description of contemporary standard French is presented makes it an
excellent choice as a textbook for university students of both French
and linguistics.

Students of the language will find this book more useful than most
handbooks because it offers a thorough description of French
pronunciation that requires only a basic knowledge of phonetic notation
and terminology. At the same time, and especially important to students
of linguistics, the sounds of the language are examined as components of
structured phonological and grammatical processes.

In situating standard French, the chosen point of reference is the
variety of language spoken by the educated Parisian bourgeoisie aged 20
to 50 years. This, however, does not mean that there are no other
French-speaking people, north or south of the capital, beyond
continental Europe, or that France is a single-class society. French is
not a monolithic code. It is alive. It is the instrument of
communication of people belonging to various socioeconomic groups
worldwide: in Dijon, Marseilles, Abidjan, and Montreal, it is the
property of doctors, lawyers, taxi drivers, stevedores, and Indian
chiefs. The registers of the language reflect this, and the author is
aware of the fact.

This awareness permeates the descriptive units—vowels, semivowels,
consonants, prosody, and language at play—that constitute the meat of
the book, while the focus remains the systematic structure of French.

Speakers of the language, students, former students, and lovers of
language will find here many pages of often amusing and always exact
observations on French sounds and their organization. The included
CD-ROM brings written description to life by providing true examples of
that eternal dimension of language—sound.