Regional Wine Terminology in Western France: a Sociohistorical Corpora-based Terminology

In a highly standardised language like French, wine terminology seems largely influenced by national and supranational standards, marked by specialists and diffused through professional training or specialised publications, for instance. Yet, in general, terms referring to wine are at the same time rooted in a territory. Where do they come from, and how do they pass from one area or group of speakers to another? How do people perceive them? Are they necessarily of vernacular tradition? For the study of regional wine terminology, this article focuses on a traditional wine-growing area in France (Poitou-Charentes). It combines the methods of historical linguistics in order to trace the origin and diffusion of regionalisms retrieved from a contemporary corpus with a sociolinguistic analysis of their status through discourse analysis and enquiries. The article analyses more than twenty dialectal terms, revealing their distribution in time and space as well as their legitimacy in current usage.