Should we now include the French nasal vowel /ɔ̃/ in descriptions of English?

The ‘English’ have an ambiguous relationship with the language of their nearest neighbour, France. There is a history, ‘1066 and all that’. Christmas Day 2016 saw the 950^th anniversary of the crowning at Westminster Abbey of the French Duke William of Normandy as King of England (not, please note, of ‘Britain’); William having defeated King Harold – and so the very last ‘English’ monarch – at the battle of Hastings. (The other ‘nations’ of these European off-shore islands have different trajectories.) Sooner or later the English at least would have to come to terms with French.

The Norman Conquest of 1066 was recorded, in the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ in late Old English, by monks at Peterborough Cathedral some 50 years after the event. These extracts include words from Latin:

but, as yet, nothing from French:

Old English comprised mixed West-Germanic dialects, akin to Low German, that developed in these European islands, with some subsequent North-Germanic additions from Scandinavian incursions. And ‘French’ itself comprised distinct Norman and Parisian varieties, evident in such differentiated French doublets subsequently imported into English as guarantee/warranty, guardian/warden … (Norman <w> /w/ marginal in standard French). Initially the two languages kept largely apart: the very small numbers of the new ruling elite speaking French; the conquered English continuing to speak their own language. But interaction required some kind of accommodation. What ensued was the slow transition in which English by the end of the 14^th century was to replace French as the language of rule. It involved a process of assimilation not merely of ‘loan words’ but of substantial French additions to the lexicon of Middle English, as in the poetry of the late 14^th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (note the French name). His characterisation of the Prioress in ‘The General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387) marks the transition:

French was relegated to the status of the prime ‘foreign’ language taught in English schools, and that now in decline.

But the English are still trying to cope with French: when citing French names and titles in English speech; and still with what was originally French vocabulary now embedded in the language (how do you pronounce ‘garage’, ‘restaurant’, ‘Renaissance’/‘Renascence’ … ?) A particular difficulty is how to deal in English with original French nasal vowels. French is rare among European languages in having nasal vowels, that is vowels partially produced through the nasal cavity as well as through the oral cavity though not closed by /m/ or /n/:

The four vowels are happily illustrated in ‘un/œ̃/ bon/ɔ̃/ vin/ε̃/ blanc’/ɑ̃/ (‘a nice white wine’), or perhaps less happily in ‘un/œ̃/ embonpoint’/ɑ̃//ɔ̃//ε̃/ (‘a certain stoutness’). These are generally represented in the writing system by a vowel letter, <a>, <e> … plus a single nasal consonant letter, either < m > or < n > . But, in metropolitan French at least, there is little phonetic difference in the articulation of /œ̃/ and /ε̃/, which can be treated as the single phoneme /ε̃/ with only a handful of contrastive items:

The difficulty is marked in the oddity of attempts by English radio and television announcers and presenters to affect French pronunciations when announcing French names and titles, often subsuming this set of nasal vowels into a single default form [ɔ̃], as generally represented by < o > plus < m > or <n > in French. This is strikingly illustrated in announcements about the French President, François Hollande, French /frɑ̃ˈswa ɔˈlɑ̃d/, so often rendered as [ˈfrɔ̃(n)swa (h)ɒˈlɔ̃(n)d] (the brackets enclosing typically intrusive nasal consonants). There is no good reason for substituting [ɔ̃] for /ɑ̃/, except as an affectation, when English /ɑn/, as in [ˈfrɑnswa ˈhɒlɑnd], is actually closer to the French /ɑ̃/.

This is a classic case of hypercorrection, a solecism substituting the single default form [ɔ̃], erroneously supposed authentic, for any other French nasal vowel in affecting French pronunciations, sometimes with grossly exaggerated French ‘r's: /ʀ/, /ʁ/. Why so? Is this an articulatory problem, difficulty in articulating the appropriate French forms, or an auditory problem, difficulty in recognising them in the first place? Is it perhaps down to how French was learned in school? It is particularly noticeable when presenters cite French names and titles on the BBC Radio 3 classical music station, from which the following recent examples are taken. These substitute [ɔ̃] erroneously, with further oddities:

• • in ‘lieu’ of /ɑ̃/: <an>, <am>, <en>, <em> …

  • – when English /an/ would be closer to the French in any case

    names:   France Musique

    • César Franck

    • Franck Martin

    • Alexandre Tarot

    • Jean François

    • Suisse Romande

    • Saint-Saens – sometimes with an erroneous final [s]

    • André Previn – but he's American!

  • titles:   ‘Moments musicaux

    • ‘Les Indes Gallantes’

    • ‘Danse fantastique’

    • ‘Chanson profond’

    • ‘Jeux d’enfants’

    • ‘légende’

    • ‘allemande’

    • ‘La Dame blanche’ – compare English ‘blanch’

• • in ‘lieu’ of /ε̃/: <in>, <ien>, <en>

  • Couperin

  • Les Musiciens du Louvre

  • Poulenc

But default [ɔ̃], in this context at least, is also infecting other well-embedded words in other contexts in English, as variants of pronunciations otherwise lacking vowel nasalisation,

• ensemble

• encore

• genre

• Renaissance

• enclave

• lingerie

Odder still is an English actor's rendering of the title of Eliot's poem ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ in a reading of T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems (BBC Radio 4, 1 January 2017), as if ‘piange’ were a French word *[pjɔ̃ʒ], albeit with what would be that erroneous default vowel in any case. It is of course an Italian word /piˈandʒe/, easy enough for any English speaker; Italian, like English, has no nasal vowels, but that's another story.

So an Anglicism, [ɔ̃]: now not just an odd local variant in a very particular register, but becoming a more general feature of ‘English’ English at least?