Levelling, resistance and divergence in the pronunciation of English and French

This article compares recent developments in the pronunciation of the English and French, with a view to analysing how certain communities are resisting the processes of levelling at work in the two countries. Levelling appears to work in different ways in England and France; in the former country, both localised and standard features are eroding, and resistance to this can be seen mostly in areas of London where innovative and highly marked ethnic features are being adopted in close-knit ‘communities of practice’. The French situation differs in that localised features are eroding in favour of a very widely distributed, socially neutral norm, and while resistance is also observable in close-knit communities, here again the difference is that resistance in French is largely manifested by the preservation of traditional dialectal features.