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These questions and others will form the crux of Designing Change: the Ways of the French Language, a research project exploring the remarkable variety of forms French has taken over time. Professor France Martineau of the University of Ottawa is principal investigator.
“Our goal is to examine how French has shaped itself over the centuries, starting with Canadian French at the time of the conquest of New France and working back to the origins of the language in the Middle Ages,” explains Professor Martineau.
Made possible by a $2.5 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Professor Martineau’s ambitious project is to be conducted over five years and will involve more than 40 researchers, 11 co-researchers from seven other universities and 28 contributing scholars located in countries around the world. Major Canadian archives are involved as privileged partners.
The project is expected to produce a fully digitized textual data base containing some 10 million words (letters exchanged between relatives, literary, legal and notarial documents), which through state-of-the-art computer technology will help pinpoint the origins and evolution of linguistic and identifiable changes to the French language.
Contributions from researchers from a variety of disciplines including linguistics, literature, history, geography and computer science will provide context for these linguistic changes.
