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RéSUMé An impressionistic phonetic analysis of more than 10 000 nasal vowels occurring in the speech of 42 Parisians born between 1907 and 1977 has been undertaken in order to test contradictory hypotheses about the nature of the changes in progress in the French nasal vowel system. The analysis includes a double approach to the data : on the individual level, we evaluate the number and nature of the nasal vowels, on the global level, we seek to trace how the entire spectrum of phonetic variants evolve over time for each nasal vowel. This approach, along with an examination of the influence of linguistic factors (such as stress), leads to a revaluation of the traditional hypotheses.