Researchers from the Interdisciplinary laboratory of digital sciences (LISN, ex-LIMSI, CNRS & Université Paris-Saclay) recently published an online speaking atlas of minority languages in Europe.

Starting from France and its Overseas, this linguistic atlas takes the form of a website, presenting interactive maps of European countries, where one can click on hundreds of survey points to listen to speech samples and read a transcript of what is said, in minority languages or dialects. Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” was recorded (a story which has been used for more than a century by the International Phonetic Association to describe many languages of the world) in over 800 survey points in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, the Iberian Peninsula, etc.

The site, accessible at https://atlas.limsi.fr/?tab=eu, aims at illustrating and valorising the richness of linguistic diversity in Europe, and plans to be extended to other continents.

The Speaking Atlas of the regional languages of France is also available as a corpus in the ELRA catalogue and can be downloaded for free (license CC-BY-NC-SA).