Historical Corpus of Substandard French. Private letters from the lower classes all over France in three periods (1789-1918) in translitterated and commented edition

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Harald Thun
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 183276809

The CHSF has the intention to contribute to fundamental research and to close the gap that exists in historiography of French in relation to the language of the majority of the population, that is the sociocultural lower classes. During the 19th century, French lower classes approached to the common language, but realized it in different regional French varieties. As an alternative, there exists writing in the so-called regional languages like Basque, German, Italian. This deviant scripturality is better known since the First World War. Concerning the period before 1914, the historiography of French is convinced that sources are lacking. Our project gathered, travelling to archives all over France, a corpus of more than 30,000 deviant documents. These almost unknown sources make it possible to compose for France, too, a linguistic history from the bottom. The second period for which we ask for financial support will be dedicated to the diatopical-diachronical edition of almost one tenth of these texts. They will be edited in diplomatic transliteration with comments and selected facsimiles. The rest of the corpus will be presented in bibliographies raisonnées. The documented time is divided in three periods 1789 to 1815, 1816 to 1913 and 1914 to 1918. This corpus will be useful not only for linguistic, social and military history, but also for research on alphabetization, extension of French in France, scripturality in regional languages and the development of the private letter written by untrained writers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants