La Revue des Patois Gallo-Romans (1887–1892) et la représentation de l'oral

The Revue des Patois Gallo-Romans appeared five years after the Jules Ferry laws,
which regulated the teaching of French and established a modern schooling
system, were adopted by the French Republic. The Revue was soon confronted with
issues raised by the description of oral varieties in a country shaped by a written
culture and actively enforcing linguistic standardisation. The problems scholars
had to face involved the choice of more or less fine-grained phonetic transcription,
determining the competence required by investigators, and the choice of reliable
speakers. A survey of the contributions to the Revue shows how dialectologists
coped with the exigencies of the standardisation program and the new importance
laid on dialects by comparative linguistics.