Segment Substitution of the French Rhotic /ʁ/ by Educated Edo-Bini French Bilinguals

The phonologies of first languages (L1) interfere with those of second languages (L2). Such interference triggers phonological processes such as substitution in the L2, as manifest among Educated Edo-Bini French Bilinguals (EEFBs) in the production of French voiced uvular approximant /ʁ/ mostly as Edo voiced alveolar trill /r/. In line with Chomsky and Halle’s Generative Phonology (GP), the theoretical framework for this paper is hinged on the Distinctive Features (DF) of these segments. Fifty EEFBs, drawn by purposive sampling from University of Benin (36), Ambrose Alli University (10) and Delta State University (04) served as participants. Audio recordings were elicited from the participants. Le Robert Micro and Samsung online dictionaries served as native speaker baseline (NSB). Quantitative data were subjected to percentages while qualitative data were analysed using GP. 96% realised the phoneme as /r/, indicating that the voiced uvular approximant /ʁ/ that is [-high] but [+back] was realised as an alveolar trill that is [+ant] and [+cor] in an environment that is [+syll]. The paper thus concluded that it was a mother tongue-induced substitution and that the rhotic produced by EEFBs does not approximate considerably to Standard French.