Description of Loan Words in French School Dictionaries: Treatment of Words of Foreign Origin in "Dictionnaire Hachette junior" (2006) and "Le Robert junior illustré" (2005)

Nathalie Gasiglia (1)

1 STL - Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163

French children learn to use dictionaries at the very beginning of their schooling. Between the ages of eight and twelve, they have access to general-purpose dictionaries which may deal with certain loan words. Our study analyses borrowings which are dealt with in a selection of this type of dictionaries: two French general dictionaries for cycle 3 which have substantial etymological content-“Dictionnaire Hachette junior” (2006) and “Robert junior illustré” (2005). The four leading general children's dictionaries for eight- to twelve-year-olds note between 116 and 619 borrowings from a selection of 4 to 52 languages. Like the dictionaries for cycle 2-students between the ages of five and height, they may provide information about the phonographic features of the borrowings indicated as such, but as cycle 3 children are supposed to read alone and be at an age when the thirst for new knowledge is very strong, it is logical that dictionaries designed for them should offer more substantial entries in terms of the nature and relative systematization of the information they provide. According to each dictionary's individual structure this information might be presented in a single entry zone-as in “Larousse junior” (2003)-or three zones-in “Robert junior illustré” and “Dictionnaire Hachette junior”. Like the number of zones uses, associated information types also vary: the information given is most often metalinguistic-phonographic, lexical, morphological, etymological, etc.-and sometimes cultural. In this analysis of the treatment of anglicisms in French dictionaries for eight- to twelve-year-olds, I propose to build a typology of etymology associated information and to examine how and where this information is given in “Dictionnaire Hachette junior” and “Robert junior illustré”, the two dictionaries which have a consistent etymological approach: 619 loan words identified in the first one and 495 in the second one.

Mots clés: dictionaries; words of foreign origins

Domaines: Linguistique

Nathalie Gasiglia. Description of Loan Words in French School Dictionaries: Treatment of Words of Foreign Origin in "Dictionnaire Hachette junior" (2006) and "Le Robert junior illustré" (2005). XIII Euralex International Congress, Jul 2008, Barcelona, Spain. pp. 1115-1122. ⟨halshs-00346840⟩