Weather perception in coastal communities: Coastal linguistic ethnographies in the Romance and Germanic areas

Résumé En

This communication is at the crossroads of ecolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, geolinguistics and ethnohistory. From our (ethnologist's) perspective, ecolinguistics is approached in two ways: Languages of environment and Ecologies of linguistic systems. By conducting repeated field surveys over a long period of time, in immersion with certain coastal communities in the cultural areas of Atlantic and Baltic Europe, we have been confronted with the questions of languages and dialects used to describe marine and coastal socio-ecosystems. The condition (weather and climate) of the sea is a primary consideration for coastal communities, who conduct a significant portion of their work cycles at sea. Meteorology disturbs or, conversely, helps sailors, fishermen and hunters in their food production practices. A whole vocabulary, specific to each community, has thus emerged over the years. Climate change is to be compared with contemporary linguistic disturbances. This paper is based on two main types of material: Past and contemporary ethnolinguistic surveys, conducted in particular within the framework of (ethno-)linguistic atlases on local to continental scales and the data collected during our own investigations.