This article gives a brief presentation of the Reference Corpus of Present day Portuguese (CRPC), that is in the process of being built at the University of Lisbon. It presents the reasons justifying its creation (among which the geographical scattering of the speakers of Portuguese), the principles that underlie the building of the corpus and the various ways in which it may be used.

The specific situation of the geolinguistic area lead to reconsider the concept of an alsatian dialect, which can be redefined on the basis of the representations and the attitudes it generates. It is suggested in this article to consider the dialectal variations firstly from a psychosociologic and secondly from a sociolinguistic point of view. Finally a short overview of the geolinguistic features that characterize of the present dialects will allow to show the complementarity of these different approaches.

In the field of French language education, the developments of corpus linguistics have spurred a reassessment of the importance of pedagogical norms and linguistic variation in teaching curricula. In this article, we focus on the phonetic-phonological dimension of the teaching/learning process and, after a short glance at pronunciation models in French, we examine the impact of sociolinguistic descriptions of varieties of French on pronunciation education. Referring to the notions of 'errors' and 'accents' among non-native speakers, we point out the need for broad and systematic corpus-based studies, comparable with native databases. Finally, we introduce the InterPhonologie du français contemporain project and look at the notion of non-native norms, both from theoretical and applied perspectives.

Whereas dialectologists and regional language militants favour the specificities of the dialects, describing 'in-situation' regional Oïl speaking, which raises interesting theoretical questions of actuality, remains an insufficiently explored domain in France. This paper shows some examples of literary texts of the Oïl regional varieties.Contrarily to the dominant French language tradition, it is demonstrated the 'French' itself (in the central Oïl area) presents diatopic variations: in contrario, in the other Oïl regions, we encounter not French but different varieties: wallon, picard, normand, gallo, poitevin-saintongeais, etc. There, the truly linguistic features cannot be dissociated from symbolic identity, and are a focus for normative constructions. The measure of their existence cannot be reduced to simple statistics (totally unreliable), but it is clear that these varieties have not (not yet ?) disappeared.Correctly apprehending these realities is important for both sociolinguistics and democracy.

Northern Italian varieties are usually divided by traditional dialectology into closed subgroups according to a rigid areal model based on isoglosses. From this viewpoint, the gallo-italian subgroup is considered a well defined and compact set, separated not only from Southern Italian varieties but also from Northern dialects of Venetia and the Rheto-roman domain. The detailed analysis of fieldwork data the micro-variation approach needs, together with an appropriate phonological theory – in this case, Government Phonology – allows to describe, in an unitary framework, a lot of processes often considered heterogeneous and independent. This perspective reveals unexpected convergences between dialects whose similarities could be made opaque in a taxonomical and historical comparative approach.