Top-Down or Bottom-Up? Understanding Diffusion of Supralocal Norms in France

Abstract

For over a century, France has held a central place in dialectological studies. The richness of its traditional dialectal variation — what Gaston Paris once called ‘une immense bigarrure’ (an immense patchwork) — attracted the interest of Romance philologists such as Jules Gilliéron, whose Atlas Linguistique de la France (ALF), compiled with Edmond Edmont (Gilliéron and Edmont, 1902–10), represents a major landmark for the discipline and continues to provide a mine of information for variationists. Recording in minute detail the findings of Edmont’s linguistic fieldwork in 639 villages in francophone Europe, the ALF inspired countless early twentieth-century dialect monographs and glossaries, while the latter half of the last century saw the publication of a series of works entitled Atlas Linguistique et Ethnographique de la France par Régions, designed to complement Gilliéron’s work and using his original fieldwork questionnaire, which attest further to continued interest in France’s regional and local variation.