Stress on French words in Jargon
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Word stress in Chinuk Wawa is pretty predictable…with a big exception.
I estimate 95% of the words in CW have their main stress on the first syllable. It’s so predictable that you hardly need to mark stress on most words, to guide learners.
But a chunk of the vocabulary comes from Canadian French, and it behaves differently. I thought I’d take a quick look to see what sense I might make of it.
In the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde 2012 dictionary’s main section, 68 words total from French carry what was originally a definite article and (consequently) have more than one syllable. These are the most recognizable “type” of French words in the language, and easiest to quickly tally up, so:
Listing stress patterns from most frequent to least frequent…
NON-VARIABLE STRESS (37 words):
- ALWAYS FINAL STRESS (32 words):
- 2 syllables (26 words): labríd, lachúk, lakán, lakúm, lalám, laláng, lalím, lapárp, lapʰíp, lapót, lasél, lashantél, latét, legléy, lekʰlú, lemulá, lepʰúl, lespró, lesháf, ləhwét, lifíl, ligwín, likʰák, likárt, lipʰlá, lishát
- 3 syllables (6 words): lakamín, lakasét, lamuwél, lapotʰáy, lapʰuwél, lariyét
- ALWAYS STRESS AFTER THE DEFINITE ARTICLE (3 words):
- lemártʰo, lesúkʰər, libárədu (& cf. the variant lakámas of the variable-stress 3-syll form)
- ALWAYS INITIAL STRESS, all having 3 syllables (2 words):
- lápʰusmu, láshəmine
VARIABLE STRESS (31 words):
- 2 SYLLABLES (23 words): láhásh, lákʰlí, lámés, lámíl, láplásh, lápúsh, lásúp, látám, láwén, líbló, líkʰrém, líkú, lílu~lelú, límá, lipʰrét, lípúm, lípʰwá, lípʰyí, lísák, líshésh, líshól, lítá, líyób
- 3 SYLLABLES all vary between initial & final stress, which may be Zenk’s Law/secondary stress on final-stressed words more than it’s stress variation (8 words): lákamás (but note further variant lakámas, cf. the 3-syllable non-variables w/stress after def art, above), lákʰarát, lámatʰín, lámatsín, lámətáy, lámiyáy, lápʰalá, límotó (there’s also lesánchél — but that’s JPH’s phonetics)
The biggest pattern here is that a whopping 66 nouns — nearly the entire sample — allow or mandate an unstressed definite article. And all but 5 of the nouns require or permit final stress. Taken together, that surely reflects a strong, distinctive influence from French prosody on this set of words.
But, essentially half the sample (33 nouns) have at least optional initial stress. I see this, especially in the 2-syllable variable nouns and the 3-syllable non-variable ones, as a possible regularization of the stress patterns to match the Jargon’s strong tendency towards initial stress.
(Which is itself perhaps a sign of English-language influence. The Indigenous languages in Chinuk Wawa’s history have much freer stress placement.)
I ought to point out here that a few other French words exist in Jargon. Some are nouns, like the above, but without definite articles, such as kúshu ‘pig’. Others are verbs, such as kúri/kúli ‘run’, tánis ‘dance’, másh ‘throw’, atá ‘wait’. And there are function words, like ə́bə ‘or’ & ába ‘oh well’. I see a lot of first-syllable stress in these words as well.
Could we alternatively claim that stress variation goes on within Canadian French? I don’t have enough data to judge that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, technically, words in French have no main stress; what an English-speaker like me hears as stresses in francophone speech, in my understanding, has more to do with phrase boundaries and the highlighting of information than it does with individual words.
I feel I haven’t reached any amazing conclusions here 🙂 But one idea is that we can take the unstressed French definite articles as a very strong noun “class marker”. Not all nouns have these, but if you find a Jargon word starting with la-, li-, etc., it’s almost certainly going to be a noun.
Your thoughts?
French has prepausal stress.
Such things as ou bien are so unstressed you can interpret any stress pattern you like into them. Such things as ah bien tend to be loud enough throughout that you can interpret all syllables as stressed, and then again interpret that as any pattern you like.
French has phrasal stress, but words in isolation are consistently and without exception stressed on the last syllable: I can see no way of accounting for this variability as a purely French phenomenon.
And I don’t think this is a “regularization” of French-origin words: why would this regularization affect some words and not others? I think this is something which can be explained diachronically: the 32 words whose stress is always final represent the last group of words which entered Chinook Jargon from French, at a time when knowledge of French was so widespread among those Chinook Jargon speakers whose descendants ended up with Grand Ronde Chinook as their dominant language that the loanwords could be reproduced with their alien (to Chinook Jargon) final stress. The two words with consistent initial stress (lápʰusmu, láshəmine) represent, conversely, the oldest layer of Chinook Jargon gallicisms, dating back to a time when French was a donor language like any other, and whose loanwords underwent the same phonological adaptation (initial stress) other loanwords did.
As for the other words, with variable stress, they must represent words which entered Chinook Jargon from French between the earliest and latest time periods referred to above: knowledge of French was spreading, and bilingual speakers must have been able to reproduce French stress placement (or use their knowledge of French to stress the initial syllable of the French etymon and not the initial /lV/ which these bilinguals knew was a separate word). Speakers of Chinook Jargon ignorant of French could not do so, of course.
As a result these speakers not knowing French stressed the final syllable of these loanwords. Since for the next generations of speakers variable stress placement became the “norm” for this stratum of words, we must assume that speakers who were bilingual in French and those who were not were each approximately equal in demographic weight/social prestige (explaining why the variability persisted over the generations).