French Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the French language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm learning French, and from what I've heard, it seems that:
with a /tʃ/ as in cheese. I heard this difference both in Duolingo and Forvo (un, une).
Is this the case in standard Parisian dialect? Why does it happen, and when?
TL;DR : this is not a standard pronunciation. Even @Gilles can't picture anyone pronouncing [tʃ] or [ts]1.
In Français Standard, it should be [sɛtyn], [tʃ] is a common variant in Cajun French and in varieties of rural France, especially in informal speech. Québécois and Acadien use [ts], which is quite close and may be related.
As for why, I am not really sure, but I suspect it is a case of mouillure or palatalisation: it happens in many mothereses in French, and in some cases in informal speech that an occlusive consonant before a front vowel is palatalised as in [k]→[kʲ]
Qui c'est ce bébé ? [kisesəbebe]
Can be pronounced [kʲisesəbebe] in motherese. I have been told by a Basque teacher that this palatalization can be mandatory in Basque when addressing relatives or close friends.
Then, as time goes by, this pronunciation can evolve to [kʃ] or [tʃ]. The same thing happened to the initial [k] Latin cabalus
[k] > [kʲ] > [tʲ] > [tʃ] > [ʃ]
which is how cabalus became cheval.
Since Cajun, and in a lesser measure Québécois inherited more from informal French, it could be how [cɛtyn] became [cɛtʃyn].
