Speaker or Language? Explaining Variance in Charismatic Prosody Across Luxembourgish and French

RESUMO

Charismatic speech is shaped by language and speaking style, yet their relative contribution in bilingual public speaking remains unclear. We analyzed spontaneous speeches of 10 politicians who address audiences in Luxembourgish and French, in highly comparable communicative contexts across languages. From 400 utterances, we extracted 41 acoustic-prosodic features linked to vocal charisma and fitted mixed-effects models to separate speaker- and language-related variance. Speaker identity accounted for most variance, whereas language explained less, but still showed systematic differences: French productions showed higher shimmer and phrase-final F0, indicative of a polite, respectful voice, while Luxembourgish productions exhibited stronger mid-frequency spectral energy, suggesting a more vocally present profile. These patterns align with the sociolinguistic roles of Luxembourgish as an informal identity language and French as a high-prestige institutional variety.