Canadian French rhotics and their continued change

In previous decades, Canadian French has undergone a sound change throughout Western Quebec where the apical trill [r] has moved to a production using the tongue dorsum, often being produced by speakers as a velar fricative [x, ɣ], uvular trill [ʀ], or uvular fricative [χ, ʁ] (Sankoff and Blondeau 2007, 2010). This change is argued to have been primarily driven by younger female speakers adopting the dorsal production, but change is also reported across the lifespan of older speakers. Discrepancies about whether variation in rhotic productions is the result of allophony from syllable position (Sankoff and Blondeau 2010) or whether variation is socially constrained (Milne 2012) also exist in the literature. This study presents an analysis of rhotics in harmonic words as produced by 9 speakers from Montreal, Quebec. We report preliminary results highlighting the acoustic differences in production (measuring center of gravity, F1, & F0) between speakers of different genders. These results support the hypothesis that variation is socially constrained, in addition to lending support to early reported hypotheses about the role of women as a driving force of this sound change (Sankoff et al. 2001).