Plurilingual corpora and polylanguaging, when corpus linguistics meets contact linguistics

International audienceThe field of contact linguistics has been expanding rapidly over the past fifteen years, but is traditionally split up into several different lines of research. The diachronic tradition tends to focus on the linguistic consequences of contact through the study of contact-induced language change. The synchronic tradition describes the effects of multilingualism and the social meanings assigned by speakers to codeswitching. Few studies attempt to take account of advances in both these lines of research at once. Language contact and multilingualism issues are addressed by so diverse research traditions that we consider corpora and data exchange as good ways to make these discuss. Contrary to, for example child language acquisition, there is in our field no widely available database that scholars around the world can access to test particular hypotheses nor a common methodology to annotate and tag corpora. Instead, every project has to first collect new data and devise more or less new methodology. We would like to describe here a specific methodology for detailed analysis of corpora which can be used to take into account both synchronic phenomena (linguistic variation and instances of polylanguaging through codeswitching, codemixing or crossing) and diachronic phenomena (change over time). We will also point out the epistemological questions that arise in the analysis of data. To do this, we rely on the methodology developed in the CLAPOTY project. After briefly describing the field of contact linguistics and the perspective of corpus linguistics, we present our plurilingual corpus and discuss the choices made with respect to the current norms and standards followed in corpus linguistics. We then present our chosen methods of identification and analysis with a view to providing multifactorial explanations in the field of language contact