Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Passed on by Norma Mendoza-Denton, this beautiful map of the regional languages of France, with a tool for playing sound files for each of them:

On the Positivr site, “La France a enfin son atlas sonore des langues régionales: En un seul clic, cette carte interactive permet de faire le tour de France des langues régionales. Du bonheur pour les oreilles.” by Axel Leclercq on 7/21/17.

The posting ends with a paean to the value of regional languages in France — with a treatment of (for example) Picard and Norman in the north and Gascon and Provençal in the south as languages in their own right and not merely local deviations from correct French; and also the recognition of the Germanic languages Flemish, Alsatian, and Franconian as regional languages on a par with, say, Breton and Basque:

Les langues régionales font partie de notre patrimoine. Elles contribuent à la diversité de notre pays. Cet outil génial permet de mieux en mesurer l’importance, de mieux les connaître et donc, pourquoi pas, de mieux les défendre !

Caveat: the map represents only regional varieties, not those primarily associated (across regions) with other sociocultural characteristics, like ethnicity, social class, age, or religion.

This entry was posted on September 10, 2017 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Language and geography, Languages, Sociolinguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.