Who are we?

VALIBEL (acronym for « Variétés LInguistiques du français de BELgique ») is a research centre which studies linguistic variation in its social context, by analysing data, above all oral data, with methods from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.

These researches are about areas as various as study of lexical distinctive features (differential lexicography), analysis of contemporary French pronunciation or spoken French syntax. They emphasize complexity and variation of language phenomena, avoiding any kind of reductionism. That involves a very strong articulation between speakers’ attested practices on the one hand, and their representations or attitudes on the other hand, such as their appear in interviews or surveys (qualitatives or quantitatives).

These areas set a multidimensional analysis of French varieties in the French speaking country, with prioritary application to the linguistic variation observed on the territory of « Wallonie-Bruxelles » Community (French speaking Belgium), where the VALIBEL centre carries out a function of contemporary French observatory.

These works have lead to the establishment of an important oral textual data base. Numbering more than four million of words, this database has been consultable since 2006 by two interfaces espacially conceived for sociolinguistic corpora research : socioDB and prosoDB.

Members of the VALIBEL centre provide teaching and training activities, in which are invested results of these researches. They are also active in the field of services to the society, in particular in the one of continious professional training, and take part in several international networks.

The VALIBEL centre, created in 1989 by Michel Francard, is joined to the « Département d’Études romanes (Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres / Philosophy and Letter Faculty) » of the Catholic University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve).