Le régiolecte marseillais à l’écran: MARSEILLE : Schwa et nasales dans la série (Dan Franck, 2016) et le film (Kad Merad, 2016)

Language in fictional audiovisual media is an artificial language, prefabricated by screenwriters and performed by actors – but since the goal of motion pictures is the immersion of the audience into the diegesis, the dialogues need to be plausible in terms of spontaneous orality (cf. Bedijs 2012 and 2017, Goetsch 1985). The characters need to speak a language which respects social and contextual aspects of the diasystem, and if one character originates from a dialectal region, one can expect their language to reflect this regiolect to a comprehensible degree. In this contribution, we offer a variational analysis with a focus on the staging of Marseille’s regiolect in the dialogues of two 2016 fictional productions sharing the title MARSEILLE: the movie directed by Merad and the Netflix series directed by Franck. Based on recent studies on the « parler marseillais » (cf. Gasquet-Cyrus 2016, Gea & Gasquet-Cyrus 2017), we take into account particularly the realisation of schwa and nasal vowels followed by nasal consonants and in some cases a velar appendix, two elements considered typical for the Southern French accent (cf. Coquillon & Durand 2010). Besides the finding that the use of accent depends on the communicative context, we suppose that the biography of the actors also plays a role for the credibility of staged language.