I've often noticed that French speakers from France have a certain "off-fricative" on high vowels, typically emphasized ones (e.g. sentence-final). You can hear it clearly on the interviewer's éviter and Paris in the first sentence of this video.
It sounds to me like the voiceless palatal fricative /ç/, though it might be better be called a voiceless vowel when one thinks of the articulation: if you produce /e/ or /i/, for instance, and then stop vibrating your vocal cords while holding all else in position, you get this sound. But /ç/ is close enough to represent it if we don't want to contemplate voiceless vowels.
How common is this? The other speakers in the video don't do it, although they also don't have much opportunity — in my experience it's most common with the highest vowel /i/, and they only have word-final /e/ in their responses.
Is it associated with a particular dialect or demographic?
Does it carry any pragmatic force? For instance, does it in fact signify emphasis, a hanging question, an ellipsis...?
