18

This article is based on a survey of French pronunciation in the Nice area, which attempts to determine whether southern features are being lost in that region and, if so, to what extent, in which part of the system and according to what stylistic and sociolinguistic modalities. To this end, a corpus of readings and spontaneous speech recordings was gathered by interviewing 25?local subjects. An auditory analysis was then conducted on 3?typical southern French phonetic features, mute?" e ", nasal vowels and mid-vowels. In general, the analysis shows a shift from the vernacular variants to their standard French equivalents, with negligible gender and stylistic variation. This change can be explained in terms of convergence or opposition between several internal and external factors of evolution.