Niezasymilowane cechy francuskich zapożyczeń: samogłoski nosowe
Non-nativized pronunciation features of French loanwords: the case of nasal vowels

Summary/Abstract: The article examines segmental and suprasegmental properties of French borrowings containing nasal vocalic segments. The occurrences of nasal vowels in the corpus of Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (Jones 2003) have been registered resulting in a stock of 380 lexical items, 271 of which display nasal (or nasalized) vowels in their first recommended pronunciation variant. The paper reviews three possible scenarios of vowel nasality adaptation: the loss of the feature resulting in unpacking, the retention of nasality involving nasalization of English vowels which substitute for their French nasal counterparts, and less frequent cases of zero assimilation of French segments. The author also argues that apart from vowel nasality French borrowings have retained other non-native characteristics, such as quantity – it is assumed that the length of the vowel segments under analysis may have been imported from French. Two arguments are raised in favour of non-nativized quantity: the stress patterns of loanwords containing long nasal (or nasalized) vowels, and the behaviour of such segments in unstressed English syllables.

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