Visualizing the “Dictionary of Regionalisms of France” (DRF)

Visualizing the Dictionnaire des R´egionalismes de France (DRF) Ada Wan University of Zurich Zurich, Switzerland ada.wan@uzh.ch Abstract This paper presents CorpusDRF, an open-source, digitized collection of regionalisms, their parts of speech and recognition rates, published in Dictionnaire des R´egionalismes de France (DRF, “Dictionary of Regionalisms of France”) (R´ezeau, 2001), enabling the visualization and analyses of the largest-scale study of French regionalisms in the 20th century using publicly available data. CorpusDRF was curated and checked manually against the entirety of the printed volume of more than 1000 pages. It contains all the entries in the DRF for which recognition rates in continental France were recorded from the surveys carried out from 1994 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2000. In this paper, in addition to introducing the corpus, we also offer some exploratory visualizations using an easy-to-use, freely available web application and compare the patterns in our analysis with that by (Goebl, 2005a) and (Goebl, 2007). Keywords: digitization and release of heritage data, visual dialectometry, data visualization 1. Introduction The DRF comprises data from the last large-scale study of lexical regionalisms in continental France in the 20th cen- tury, which took place from 1994 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2000. This paper describes a project carried out in 2016 with the following goals: i. to curate the data on recognition rates published in the DRF as CorpusDRF, ii. to provide preliminary analysis of the DRF data through hierarchical clustering, including exploratory visualization of some potential “regions” of lexical re- gionalisms based on the DRF, and iii. to evaluate the result from [ii.] by comparing with pre- vious work performed by (Goebl, 2005a) and (Goebl, 2007) and by examination of the nature of our ap- proach in relation to that of the survey design. 2. Data The DRF is the first comprehensive book presenting a care- ful description of regionalisms of mainland France with up to 1,100 headword entries, furnished with definitions, ex- amples, comments, citations and quotes, along with results from a survey of regionalisms carried out between 1994 and 1996 in France (EnqDRF), with a supplementary sur- vey between 1999 and 2000, in form of recognition rates for the regionalisms in their relevant departments/regions as well as maps depicting the diatopic distribution of 330 regionalisms throughout France on the departmental level. Linguists from different regions compiled a list of known lexical facts characteristic of their regions which was then turned into a questionnaire – this resulted in about 4,500 facts being tested. A few years ago, much of the DRF data fell victim to an administrative housekeeping effort. The corpus we curated manually from the printed version of this heritage volume is the only open-source digital version of the DRF recognition rates mapping entries (annotated with their parts of speech) with the corresponding departments. 2.1. Data documentation and profile Entries (indicating a headword, a variant of a headword, or a multi-word expression involving the headword) with recognition rates published in the DRF were transcribed manually into a plain text …

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