The Berrichon Language in France: Social Context, Language Vitality, and Documentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the language vitality of Berrichon, a regional language spoken in central France.Like many other regional languages, and especially languages belonging to the langues d'oïl language family, Berrichon is endangered.The last speakers of the language are older adults (60 and plus), and there is barely any intergenerational language transmission of Berrichon.While most people in the area know that Berrichon is endangered and will likely disappear soon, there is no data on its vitality status.To understand the vitality of Berrichon, a language vitality survey was designed and used to gather data on language competence, language use, and language attitudes of Berrichon people.717 people participated in the questionnaire, and 8 participated in interviews to complement the answers to the questionnaires.The results of this survey show that most people express positive language attitudes and pride towards Berrichon, even if they do not speak it.For example, even if most participants do not use Berrichon, they believe it is important to preserve it due to its cultural significance.At the same time, while maintaining the language is seen as important, participants are often not ready to be the ones initiating it.Multiple reasons explain this lack of use, such as the dominance of Standard French, movement of population to cities, the perceived negative stereotypes around Berrichon, and the perception of Berrichon as a language of the past.As such, Berrichon appears as a postvernacular language (Shandler, 2005), where it represents an important aspect of the culture of the Berry area, but is not used as a means of communication.The example of Berrichon is not unique but presents an excellent case study of the language situation in France as well as other languages in different parts of the world.iii This dissertation also includes a detailed analysis of the properties of language vitality surveys, and a small documentation project on Berrichon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".