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Southern French
Meridional French (french: français méridional), also referred to as Francitan, is a regional variant of the French language. It is widely spoken in Marseille, Avignon and Toulouse and is influenced by the Occitan language. There are speakers of Meridional French in all generations, but the accent is most marked among the elderly, who often speak Occitan as their first language. Characteristics The phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of Occitan have all influenced Meridional French, but the phonological effects are perhaps the most salient by producing the characteristic accent, which is used by speakers of Meridional French. Those effects include the following: * The loss of phonemic nasal vowels, which are replaced by an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant * the frequent realisation of the final atonal vowels of Latin, which are lost by speakers of other varieties of French, as schwa * the presence of lexical stress on the penultimate syllable of many words, ...
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Occitania
Occitania ( oc, Occitània , , or ) is the historical region in Western Europe, Western and Southern Europe where the Occitan language, Occitan language was historically spoken and where it is sometimes still used as a second language. This cultural area roughly encompasses the southern third of France (with the exception of the French Basque Country and Northern Catalonia, French Catalonia) as well as part of Spain (Aran Valley), Monaco, and smaller parts of Italy (Occitan Valleys, Guardia Piemontese). Occitania has been recognized as a linguistic and cultural concept since the Middle Ages, but has never been a legal nor a political entity under this name. However, the territory was united in Roman times as the ''Septem Provinciae, Seven Provinces'' ( la, Septem Provinciæ) and in the Early Middle Ages (''Aquitanica'' or the Visigothic Kingdom#Kingdom of Toulouse, Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse, or the share of Louis the Pious following Thionville ''divisio regnorum'' in 806) ...
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Schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it represents the mid central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded), produced when the lips, tongue, and jaw are completely relaxed, such as the vowel sound of the in the English word ''about''. In English, some long-established phonetic transcription systems assert that the mid central vowel as an unstressed vowel and transcribed with schwa (ə) is always a different vowel sound from the open-mid back unrounded vowel as a stressed vowel and transcribed with turned v ( ʌ), although they may recognize allophony between the pair. As Geoff Lindsey explains, within these systems, it is said that "schwa is never stressed"; but other authorities (including Lindsey himself) recognize that in some varieties of English, such as General American Engli ...
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Gascony
Gascony (; french: Gascogne ; oc, Gasconha ; eu, Gaskoinia) was a province of the southwestern Kingdom of France that succeeded the Duchy of Gascony (602–1453). From the 17th century until the French Revolution (1789–1799), it was part of the combined Province of Guyenne and Gascony. The region is vaguely defined, and the distinction between Guyenne and Gascony is unclear; by some they are seen to overlap, while others consider Gascony a part of Guyenne. Most definitions put Gascony east and south of Bordeaux. It is currently divided between the region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine (departments of Landes, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, southwestern Gironde, and southern Lot-et-Garonne) and the region of Occitanie (departments of Gers, Hautes-Pyrénées, southwestern Tarn-et-Garonne, and western Haute-Garonne). Gascony was historically inhabited by Basque-related people who appear to have spoken a language similar to Basque. The name Gascony comes from the same root as the word Basq ...
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Sociolect
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language ( non-standard dialect, restricted register) or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, an age group, or other social group. Sociolects involve both passive acquisition of particular communicative practices through association with a local community, as well as active learning and choice among speech or writing forms to demonstrate identification with particular groups. The term ''sociolect'' might refer to socially-restricted dialects, but it is sometimes also treated as equivalent with the concept of register, or used as a synonym for jargon and slang. Individuals who study sociolects are called sociolinguists. Sociolinguists study language variation. Sociolinguists define a sociolect by examining the social distribution of specific linguistic terms. For example, a sociolinguist would examine the use of the second person pronoun "you" for its use within the population. If one distinct social grou ...
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Variation (linguistics)
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary pronunciation ( accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax (sometimes called "grammar"). But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in sentence word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate with language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still (often unconsciously) sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect. Variationists study how a language changes by observing it. This is accomplished by looking at authentic data. For example, variation is studied by looking at linguistic and social environments, then the data is analyzed as the change occurs. Variation in research programs must be malleable due to the nature of language itself. This is because language i ...
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Calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" was calqued in dozens of other languages. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as ''interpretatio germanica'': the Latin "Day of Mercury", ''Mercurii dies'' (later "mercredi" in modern French), was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (*''Wodanesdag''), which became ''Wōdnesdæg'' in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English. The term ''calque'' itself is a loanword from the French noun ("tracing, imitation, close copy"), while the word ''loanword'' is a calque ...
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Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of the world's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, gastronomy, and science. For its leading role in the arts and sciences, as well as its very early system of street lighting, in the 19th century it became known as "the City of Light". Like London, prior to the Second World War, it was also sometimes called the capital of the world. The City of Paris is the centre of the Île-de-France region, or Paris Region, with an estimated population of 12,262,544 in 2019, or about 19% of the population of France, making the region France's primate city. The Paris Region had a GDP of €739 billion ($743 billion) in 2019, which is the highest in Europe. According to the Economist Intelli ...
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Pain Au Chocolat
Pain au chocolat (, literally "chocolate bread"), also known as chocolatine () in the south-west part of France and in Canada, or couque au chocolat in Belgium, is a type of Viennoiserie pastry consisting of a cuboid-shaped piece of yeast-leavened laminated dough, similar in texture to a puff pastry, with one or two pieces of dark chocolate in the center. Pain au chocolat is made of the same layered doughs as a croissant. Often sold still hot or warm from the oven, they are commonly sold alongside croissants in French bakeries and supermarkets. Name In France, the name of the pain au chocolat varies by region: *In the Hauts-de-France and in Alsace, the words or are used. *In central France, in southern France and in Paris, is used. *In southwestern France (Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie) and in Canada, the word is used. In Belgium, the words are also used. They are often sold in packages at supermarkets and convenience stores, or made fresh in pastry shops. * In Mor ...
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French Phonology
French phonology is the sound system of French. This article discusses mainly the phonology of all the varieties of Standard French. Notable phonological features include its uvular r, nasal vowels, and three processes affecting word-final sounds: * liaison, a specific instance of sandhi in which word-final consonants are not pronounced unless they are followed by a word beginning with a vowel; * elision, in which certain instances of (schwa) are elided (such as when final before an initial vowel); * (resyllabification) in which word-final and word-initial consonants may be moved across a syllable boundary, with syllables crossing word boundaries: An example of the above is this: *Written: ' *Meaning: "We left the window open." *In isolation: *Together: Consonants Phonetic notes: * are laminal denti-alveolar , while are dentalised laminal alveolar (commonly called 'dental'), pronounced with the blade of the tongue very close to the back of the upper front teeth, wit ...
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Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms ''stress'' and ''accent'' are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called ''pitch accent'', and when produced through length alone, it is called ''quantitative accent''. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called ''stress accent'' or ''dynamic accent''; English uses what is called ''variable stress accent''. Since stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are also used for other linguistic functions), it is difficult to define stress ...
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Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ...
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Glottolog
''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany). Its main curators include Harald Hammarström and Martin Haspelmath. Overview Sebastian Nordhoff and Harald Hammarström created the Glottolog/Langdoc project in 2011. The creation of ''Glottolog'' was partly motivated by the lack of a comprehensive language bibliography, especially in ''Ethnologue''. Glottolog provides a catalogue of the world's languages and language families and a bibliography on the world's less-spoken languages. It differs from the similar catalogue '' Ethnologue'' in several respects: * It tries to accept only those languages that the editors have been able to confirm both exist and are distinct. Varieties that have not been confirmed, but are inherited from anothe ...
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