Meridional French is a regional variant of the French language

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

. It is strongly influenced by Occitan and so widely spoken in Occitania

Occitania

Occitania , also sometimes lo País d'Òc, "the Oc Country"), is the region in southern Europe where Occitan was historically the main language spoken, and where it is sometimes still used, for the most part as a second language...

. It is also referred to as Francitan.

Speakers of Meridional French can be found in all generations, although the accent is more pronounced among the elderly, who often speak Occitan as their first language

First language

A first language is the language a person has learned from birth or within the critical period, or that a person speaks the best and so is often the basis for sociolinguistic identity...

.

Characteristics of the dialect

Meridional French was affected by the Occitan language in a number of ways, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Perhaps most salient, however, were the phonological effects of the language, resulting in the characteristic accent of Meridional French speakers. Those effects have been characterized in part as: a loss of phonemic nasal vowels, replaced instead with an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant; the frequent realization of schwa as a stand-in for Latin's final atonal vowel, lost by speakers of other varieties of French; and the presence of a lexical stress on the penultimate syllable in many words, in contrast to Standard French's final phrase stress.

Meridional French is also subject to a phonological law known as the Law of Position. This principle is strictly adhered to by speakers of Meridional French, in contrast to speakers of other varieties of French. In brief, it says that mid vowels are subject to allophonic variation based on the shape of their syllables. A mid-open vowel will be realized in a closed syllable (one ending in a consonant), and a mid-close vowel will be realized in an open syllable (one ending in a vowel). The phenomenon has been shown to be somewhat more complex than this, however, as shown by Durand (1995), Eychenne (2006), and Chabot (2008).

Lexicon

The dialect has some vocabulary peculiar to it, such as péguer (Occitan pegar), "to be sticky" (standard French poisser), chocolatine, "pain au chocolat

Pain au chocolat

A pain au chocolat , also called a chocolatine in southern France and in French Canada, is a French pastry consisting of a cuboid-shaped piece of yeast-leavened laminated dough, similar to puff pastry, with one or two pieces of chocolate in the centre.Pain au chocolat is made of the same puff...

" or flute (a bigger baguette, called pain parisien (parisian bread) in Paris).

Dégun (nobody), from Occitan degun [deˈɡyn], is often used in southern France, instead of personne; as in "Il y a dégun ici" (there's nobody here) or "je crains dégun" (I fear no one).

Some phrases can mean something different from what they would usually mean in French. For example, s'il faut, literally meaning "if it is necessary", actually means "maybe" (which would be rendered in standard French as peut-être). This is a calque

Calque

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...

of Occitan se cal.