Meridional French (French: Français méridional) is a regional variant of the French language. It is strongly influenced by Occitan and so widely spoken in Occitania. It is also referred to as Francitan.
Speakers of Meridional French can be found in all generations, although the accent is more pronounced among the elderly, who often speak Occitan as their first language.
Meridional French was affected by the Occitan language in a number of ways, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Perhaps most salient, however, were the phonological effects of the language, resulting in the characteristic accent of Meridional French speakers. Those effects have been characterized in part as: a loss of phonemic nasal vowels, replaced instead with an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant; the frequent realization of schwa as a stand-in for Latin's final atonal vowel, lost by speakers of other varieties of French; and the presence of a lexical stress on the penultimate syllable in many words, in contrast to Standard French's final phrase stress.
Meridional French is also subject to a phonological law known as the Law of Position. This principle is strictly adhered to by speakers of Meridional French, in contrast to speakers of other varieties of French. In brief, it says that mid vowels are subject to allophonic variation based on the shape of their syllables. A mid-open vowel will be realized in a closed syllable (one ending in a consonant), and a mid-close vowel will be realized in an open syllable (one ending in a vowel). The phenomenon has been shown to be somewhat more complex than this, however, as shown by Durand (1995), Eychenne (2006), and Chabot (2008).
The dialect has some vocabulary peculiar to it, such as péguer (Occitan pegar), "to be sticky" (standard French poisser), chocolatine, "pain au chocolat" or flute (a bigger baguette, called pain parisien (parisian bread) in Paris).
Dégun (nobody), from Occitan degun [deˈɡyn], is often used in southern France, instead of personne; as in "Il y a dégun ici" (there's nobody here) or "je crains dégun" (I fear no one).
Some phrases can mean something different from what they would usually mean in French. For example, s'il faut, literally meaning "if it is necessary", actually means "maybe" (which would be rendered in standard French as peut-être). This is a calque of Occitan se cal.
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