Altérité lexicale dans les parlers francophones : figure de l’étranger

Relationships with others raise issues of identity and characterize individuals in their behavior with others. These identity issues, which are specific to each society, are sources of the discourse of otherness. In the French-speaking space which, by its essence and in the light of historical facts, reflects otherness, this discourse is reflected in the terms and lexies of topolectal varieties of French. Based on an onomasiological approach, going from definition to words to discover how otherness is presented, this research aims to identify and present the lexical aspect of the discourse of others in a lexicographical corpus from all over the French-speaking world. In other words, this article studies the topolectal speaking of French to find terms used to evoke otherness. Terms such as “French”, “European”, “foreign”, “white” were the object of a first observation given that they constitute the reverses of a discourse of domination in the dichotomy colonizer-colonized against with “aboriginal” “negro” and “black”. Through illustrated examples, we demonstrate that different aspects such as physical, geographic, and identity traits are vehicles of this discourse which, axiologically, mainly present the pejorative values attributed to the other. Also, it would seem that colonial memory helps to nourish this vision of the other who stands out from the speakers, whose speech is studied, by his foreign origin.