Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America

The Dictionnaire des Francophones (DDF), bearing the imprimatur of France’s Ministry of Culture, is a laudable attempt to create a dictionary of the French language from far and wide. It represents a genuine effort to recognize that there is value in documenting the dialectal and sociolectal variation found across the Francophone world. In a country famous for its tendencies toward centralization and its reverence for a rigidly standardized form of its sole official language, the DDF attests that ideas about decentralization in France and the value of la Franco-phonie to the status of French as a world language have been accepted at the highest levels of French government. It is a way of demonstrating that the French language is not solely the remit of the venerated French Academy, but also of each and every speaker of French around the world. As such, it is committed to being a work its users can participate directly in building and monitoring and is largely based on the French Wiktionnaire (Wiktionary), another participatory dictionary. Because this is an online dictionary and very clearly still a work in progress, I will discuss the areas of the DDF that ought not to change and then some aspects that must be dealt with rather soon.

Starting a dictionary with such a broad scope from scratch would have been a massive undertaking, so the DDF is cleverly scaffolded on existing resources that already meet its criteria of inclusivity. In addition to the aforementioned Wiktionnaire, it incorporates the Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire, the Dictionnaire des [End Page 221] synonymes, des mots et expressions des français parlés dans le monde, the work Belgicismes—Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Belgique, the Dictionnaire des régionalismes de France, and the Base de données lexicographiques panfrancophone, with terminological databases FranceTerme and the Grand Dictionnaire terminologique (Québec) to be added in coming months. Comparisons between the DDF and several of these sources indicates that they were imported into the online version without deliberate modification. By virtue of harvesting these existing lexicographic and terminological resources, the DDF claims to have 400,000 entries from around the world, with particular attention to Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The web and app interfaces are very similar. The front matter is easy to locate and to understand. There are Search and Help buttons at the top of each page, and a drop-down menu in the top right corner of each page explains the history and purpose of the DDF and, to a lesser extent, that of its source materials. It gives mostly good information on the characteristics of the Francophone world (though it inexplicably excludes the Antilles as a notable location where French Creoles are spoken). Important for a work inviting contributions from the public, there is a good section on how to write a sense for a dictionary, with explanations that are clear and light on jargon; they would be suitable as part of any introductory lexicography course. On the page about understanding an entry, discussions of French grammar are interspersed with information about the use of certain labels such as vieilli ‘old’ and familier ‘familiar’. Some of the jargon in the grammar discussions is used in entries (such as tense and person vocabulary), while other terms are not found as labels in the dictionary (for example, certain sense relations such as holonyme ‘holonym, whole-for-part metonym’ and par litote ‘as under-statement’), slightly undermining the quality of the section. For lexicographers looking to understand the project better, the description of the project laid out in Dolar et al. (2020) would be even more useful than the front matter.

The DDF has several features that I believe are important for the user and for the mission. The first notable departure from other French dictionaries is the privileging of regional senses over worldwide senses. For example, the entry quitter ‘leave (tr.)’ lists senses from the Caribbean...