L'écart entre l'écrit et l'oral en français : hypothèses systémiques sur l'avenir de l'orthographe

This study proposes to make hypotheses on an evolution of the orthography of the French language, considering the trends of its typological evolution. Among the Romance languages, French, which can be qualified as “semi-phonemic”, is undoubtedly the one in which we can observe the largest gap between the written and oral codes. In order to understand and analyse the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms underlying the specificity of the French language, the analysis of systemic changes in the lexicon of French was privileged. The most important mechanism for understanding the phenomenon of syllabic reduction of words is the process of “demorphologization” of the substantive from Latin to Romance languages. This is the reason why, in the spoken language, truncations are very frequent and can lead to increasingly shortened spellings. This systemic development, which typologically brings French closer to isolating languages, will therefore widen the gap between writing and speaking and allow to consider new hypotheses for the future and the teaching of the orthographic system.