Le dictionnaire comme description de contact et comme moyen de contact: une étude de cas sur le Dictionnaire Français-Lolo, dialecte gni du père Paul Vial

Abstract

By his Dictionnaire Français-Lolo, dialecte gni (1909), Paul Vial was rewarded as the laureate of the Stanislas-Julien prise by the French Académie des Inscription et des Belles-Lettres in 1910, for one of the best studies in sinology of the year. As a Priest from Paris Foreign Missions Society, this dictionary can be served as an interesting corpus for investigating the contact between the three languages concerned in the dictionary: the Lolo-Gni, also called Yi-Sani, the French, which was used as the tool of this linguistic description, and a dialectal variety of Chinese Mandarin, which is the vehicle language at Yunnan. By linking this dictionary to its context, the present paper aims at understanding how the language contact was laid out in this bilingual dictionary: which phenomena were described? How was the connection between these phenomena and their social context?