Phrase-final fricative epithesis (PFFE), often indicated in informal writing with a final -h or -ch, e.g. beaucoup_h, oui_ch, is a sociophonetic variable of Hexagonal French in which utterance-final vowels give way to intense fricative-like whistles. Production research has found PFFE to be used at equal rates among men and women, and perception research has found that native French speakers perceive it to mark either formal speech or intense affect. This research furthers the special issue’s line of inquiry on French variation in forms of digital media by extending the analysis to a sociophonetic variable with a robust life on Twitter. The study compares the pragmatic value of tweets containing PFFE with previously described values and then examines interactions of gender, hostword phrasal location and lexical frequency on its realization. 96.8% of PFFE occurrences in the 2060-token corpus were classified into the pragmatic categories of Formality and Intense Affect. Results suggest that PFFE has become a salient enough sociophonetic variable that 21st-century French users represent it graphically in their tweets, however, its usage is structurally more permissive than in spoken language, signaling that it has taken on an iconic value in digital spaces.

Papers in this Special Issue fill a gap in French sociolinguistics by providing a coherent and yet diverse sample of empirical studies on a variety of structural aspects of French digital media. Collectively, their thematic focus reflects a traditional framing of language variation, well known from variationist sociolinguistics, correlating empirically observed phonological, morphological, and lexical patterns with social and linguistic variables, among them age, gender, and genre. In this commentary, I reflect on each paper’s unique contribution to recent sociolinguistic research on digital media, and the volume’s goal to examine socially conditioned variation in selected contexts of twenty-first-century digital writing in French.

It is standardly assumed that French does not have word-stress, rather it has phrase-level prominence. I will advance a number of arguments, many of which have appeared already in the literature, that cumulatively suggest that French roots are characterized by phonological prominence, even if this is non-contrastive. By prominence, I mean a syntagmatically distributed strength that has all the phonological characteristics of stress in other Romance languages. I will remain agnostic about the nature of that stress, eschewing the lively debate about whether French has feet, and if so what type, and at what level. The structure of the argument is as follows. French demonstrably has phonological word-final strength but one wonders what the source of this strength is. Positionally, the initial position is strong and, independently of cases where it is reinforced by other factors, the final position is weak. I will argue, based on parallels with other Romance languages, that French word-final strength derives from root-final phonological stress. The broader significance of this conclusion is that syntagmatic properties are enough to motivate underlying forms, even in the absence of paradigmatic contrasts (minimal pairs).