Multiple-choice question about nasal vowels in French

[Particles the Greek]

Today on the bus I heard a French woman talking to her daughter, and I noticed that many of what I expected to be nasal vowels had very little if any nasalisation. Was this:

a) a personal idiosyncracy of the speaker?
b) a defect in my auditory faculties?
c) an example of a tendency to denasalise vowels in some varieties of French?
d) none of the above (please explain)?

[Legion]

I'd tend toward a mixture of b and c; nasalisation can indeed be pretty weak, but it's not normally completely absent.

[vec]

Non-native speakers tend to overemphasize the nasalization and have a hard time hearing it.

If you're American you probably have a lot of nasal vowels in your speech but it's unlikely you're ever aware of them at all. Same for me when speaking both Icelandic and American English: both have phonetic nasal vowels but because they're not phonemic your "auditory faculties" are not attuned to hearing them.

I'd chalk it up to lack of practice, experience and/or exposure to French. You might need to train yourself to hear them better.

[Travis B.]

Non-native speakers tend to overemphasize the nasalization and have a hard time hearing it.

If you're American you probably have a lot of nasal vowels in your speech but it's unlikely you're ever aware of them at all. Same for me when speaking both Icelandic and American English: both have phonetic nasal vowels but because they're not phonemic your "auditory faculties" are not attuned to hearing them.

I'd chalk it up to lack of practice, experience and/or exposure to French. You might need to train yourself to hear them better.

In at least the English I'm used to, there are essentially two levels of vowel nasalization - weakly nasalized vowels, where following [n] is not elided, which I have a hard time perceiving as nasalized, and strongly nasalized vowels, where following [n] is elided, which I easily perceive as nasalized.

When emulating French pronunciation, I am strongly inclined to use these strongly nasalized vowels, which might sound overly nasalized to actual French people, and conversely, if they use nasal vowels akin to my own weakly nasalized vowels, I would probably not notice them as being nasal.

[Hakaku]

Could it be possible that the French you heard spoken was in a dialect that you're not used to hearing? Because there's a pretty big difference in vowels between North American French varieties and those of France.

[Particles the Greek]

Could it be possible that the French you heard spoken was in a dialect that you're not used to hearing? Because there's a pretty big difference in vowels between North American French varieties and those of France.

Perhaps, although I was in the UK at the time (and still am).