Juliette Janes


2024

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Molyé: A Corpus-based Approach to Language Contact in Colonial France
Rasul Dent | Juliette Janes | Thibault Clerice | Pedro Ortiz Suarez | Benoît Sagot
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

Whether or not several Creole languages which developed during the early modern period can be considered genetic descendants of European languages has been the subject of intense debate. This is in large part due to the absence of evidence of intermediate forms. This work introduces a new open corpus, the Molyé corpus, which combines stereotypical representations of three kinds of language variation in Europe with early attestations of French-based Creole languages across a period of 400 years. It is intended to facilitate future research on the continuity between contact situations in Europe and Creolophone (former) colonies.