| الملخص: | By conducting an apparent-time analysis of the OFROM corpus collected in Francophone Switzerland, this study examined the use of <i>genre</i> as discourse marker in the speech of 306 French L1 speakers. First, we examined the effect of extralinguistic factors on the discursive use of <i>genre</i>. The logistic mixed-effects regression analysis results revealed that the emerging use of <i>genre</i> is indeed an ongoing change led by female speakers in Swiss French. This use was favored by monolinguals in Francophone Swiss. Second, we examined the vowel reduction of the DM <i>genre</i> in the corpus. Our results revealed that speakers who received only a high school education favor the vowel reduction in the DM <i>genre</i> the most. Given the high percentage of phonological reduction in the DM <i>genre</i>, we believe that the grammaticalization of this particle has reached its advanced stage in Swiss French. Compared to previous findings on the emerging use of <i>genre</i> in Hexagonal French, we suggested that the grammaticalization of the particle <i>genre</i> in Swiss French may be independent of that in Hexagonal French. The grammaticalization in Swiss French was much more advanced than in Hexagonal French. This study supplied comparable results on the grammaticalization of the same particle in two different Francophone countries.
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