Paul Passy, A Radical Linguist Language Teaching, Spelling Reform, and the Creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet

Jacques Durand, Professor Emeritus, University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès,Chantal S. Lyche, Professor Emerita, University of Oslo

Jacques Durand is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and was previously Director of the CNRS research centre 'Cognition, Langues, Language, Ergonomie' in Toulouse. He is an honorary senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France and has held academic posts in Aberdeen, Essex, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence. His many publications, primarily in the areas of phonology and machine translation, include the OUP edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology (with Gert Kristoffersen and Ulrike Gut, 2014) and Varieties of Spoken French (with Sylvain Detey, Bernard Laks, and Chantal Lyche, 2016; paperback 2018). He is the co-founder, with Chantal Lyche and Bernard Laks, of the research programme 'Phonologie du français contemporain'.

Chantal Schwoerer Lyche is Professor Emerita at the University of Oslo, and was an affiliated member of the CASTL Centre of Excellence at the University of Tromsø. Her publications focus on French phonology, varieties of French in the Francophone world (particularly Louisiana and Africa), and the teaching of French as a foreign language. She is the co-editor, with Sylvain Detey, Jacques Durand, and Bernard Laks, of Varieties of Spoken French (OUP, 2016; paperback 2018), and co-founder, with Jacques Durand and Bernard Laks, of the research programme 'Phonologie du français contemporain'. Within the framework of the European Language Council, she also contributed to the pilot development of the European Language Portfolio in the Higher Education Sector.

1. Introduction2. Paul Passy: A biographical sketch3. Passy as a philologist and dialectologist4. Spelling reform5. Language teaching and the Direct Method6. Les sons du francais: Original fine-grained descriptions7. Passy and the creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet: The early days8. The creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet: The Passy-Jones collaboration9. The International Phonetic Alphabet: From early criticisms to worldwide success10. Conclusion