Phonological adaptation of loanwords: the case of French gastronomy terms in Czech

We analyse the phonological processes underlying the adaptation of French gastronomic terms into Czech. After setting out a paradigm of adaptation processes, we describe an empirical survey in which a group of 28 informants from four different social groups were asked to read sentences containing 30 orthographically non-adapted gastronomic terms. The conclusions are as follows: (1) The studied items exhibit a very high phonological variability, which represents a consequence of their peripheral status in the lexical system. (2) The conceptual knowledge of a term increases the chance that its phonological realisation will be closer to the reference form. (3) For unknown items, speakers tend to rely on spelling, using Czech grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules. (4) Although the informants had no knowledge of French, they sometimes used elements of French phonology in their pronunciation. (5) The group of informants working in the restaurant industry did not achieve significantly better results than other speakers living in Prague. The lowest score was recorded in the group of speakers living in rural areas. (6) Pronunciation variants elicited from informants who knew other languages were closer to the reference forms.

Keywords: Loanwords; phonology; French; Czech; gastronomy