A Speaking Atlas of the Regional Languages of France

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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.