Abstract

This article aims to introduce Corpus FRAN, the first online pan-francophone corpus pertaining to North American varieties of French, developed as part of the international project Le français à la mesure d’un continent (F. Martineau, dir.). We begin by stating the general theoretical questions underlying the project as a whole, and the development of Corpus FRAN in particular. We continue with a discussion of the architecture of the corpus, its transcription protocols, and the user interface. Corpus FRAN was designed so as to cover several centuries and different communities. It features a mode of crossed interrogation allowing the study of converging and diverging trends within and between communities, as well as insights into the life paths of speakers and writers. We illustrate some of the research possibilities afforded by the corpus with the study of two variants that are typical of North American French: m’as (and the related variants je vas and je vais) and the variants of consequence ça fait que and so (and the related alors and donc).