A Speaking Atlas of the Regional Languages of France

A Speaking Atlas of the Regional Languages of France Philippe Boula de Mareüil1, Frédéric Vernier1, Albert Rilliard1,2 1LIMSI, CNRS & Univ. Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France; 2 Univ. Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Brazil {philippe.boula.de.mareuil, frederic.vernier, albert.rilliard}@limsi.fr Abstract The aim is to show and promote the linguistic diversity of France, through field recordings, a computer program (which allows us to visualise dialectal areas) and an orthographic transcription (which represents an object of research in itself). A website is presented (https://atlas.limsi.fr), displaying an interactive map of France from which Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” can be listened to and read in French and in 140 varieties of regional languages. There is thus both a scientific dimension and a heritage dimension in this work, insofar as a number of regional or minority languages are in a critical situation. Keywords: geolinguistics, dialectology, speaking atlas 1. Introduction Even if the modern Western world appears to be domina- ted by just a few widespread languages dialectologists in the field quickly observe a great deal of diversity. The idea of reporting this diversity on maps is not novel (Le Dû et al., 2005): from 1897 to 1901, E. Edmont traveled through France and its Gallo-Romance outskirts to carry out surveys in over 600 communes, mapped in the Atlas Linguistique de la France [ALF] (Gilliéron & Edmont, 1902–1910). Since the Second World War, the Atlas linguistiques de la France par régions (Séguy, 1973a; Tuaillon, 1976) have continued to document increasingly threatened languages and dialects — the limit between languages and dialects being ill-defined (Sibille, 2010). Recently, audio recordings have been digitised, at least for the Occitan (or Oc, Southern Gallo-Romance) domain, as part of the Thesaurus Occitan [Thesoc] (Sauzet & Brun- Trigaud, 2013) and the Francoprovençal domain, with the Atlas Multimédia de la région Rhône-Alpes [ALMuRA] (Médélice, 2008), but they are not entirely available — and the Oïl (i.e., Northern Gallo-Romance) domain is even more under-resourced (Léonard & Djordjević, 2009). Following the principle of paper dialectological atlases and benefiting from computer technology, the Corpus de la parole now gives online access to an audio corpus of great wealth (Jacobson & Baude, 2011). However, comparable data are sorely lacking, and despite national projects such as SyMiLa (http://symila.univ- tlse2.fr/), concerning syntactic variation, research on dialectal variation in France is somewhat lagging behind what is done in the Netherlands and Norway (Heeringa, 2004), Germany and Italy (Iannàccaro & Dell’Aquila, 2001), for example. The dominant position of the French language masks a linguistic diversity among the most exemplary of Europe, which the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (signed by France in 1999 but not ratified) proposed to promote. Similarly, Unesco insists on the need for multilingualism in cyber- space (Vannin et al., 2012); and general public-oriented sites are multiplying, offering people to record themselves all over the globe and asking social networks to vote for this or that recording, but without linguistic control. It is therefore important, even urgent, to collect recordings using a coordinated approach, applying a …

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