100

This article reviews the recent published data concerning the standard of pronunciation of spoken French in Quebec (and in Canada more generally). First, we describe the norm of pronunciation that was proposed by the Office de la langue française in the 1960s. We then discuss a more recent and generally accepted model, that of Radio-Canada, that is to say the pronunciation practiced by radio and television newscasters of the French-language national radio and television network. We briefly present the general pronunciation guidelines that the Société Radio-Canada (SRC) has proposed and show that even though this pronunciation seems to have become the “norm” or “standard” for spoken French in both Quebec and Canada, the specific phonetic features proposed by the SRC are identical to those prescribed in the Dictionnaire de la prononciation française dans sa norme actuelle (Warnant 1987), which happens to be a Continental French dictionary and whose phonetic features are definitely “Parisian”. In the second part, we describe the results of two empirical studies dealing with the actual pronunciation practices of a number of Radio-Canada television newscasters, those of Cox (1998) and of Reinke (2005). We compare the features on which both researches agree as well as those on which they disagree and show that there exist a number of divergent points between the empirical data obtained and the hypothetical model proposed by the SRC. Our analysis concludes with a synthesis of those pronunciation features which seem to be common to all SRC newscasters and which are thus part of the “norm” as well as those that are still subject to some degree of variation and therefore not yet fixed by the “norm”. Finally, we briefly reflect on the place that should be given to this putative pan-Canadian French pronunciation norm in manuals of French in Canada, particularly those of French as a second language.