The digitalization of spoken language corpora opens large perspectives for linguistics. However, the archiving and the exploitation of these spoken corpora raise new ethical and legal problems that the scientific community must take into account. This article presents the results of an interdisciplinary working group which wrote a Guide of good practices for the constitution, the exploitation, the archiving and the diffusion of spoken language corpora.

The desire to make use of large collections of oral data is nowadays largely shared by linguists. At a time when such tools are becoming increasingly available for French, it is important to make sure that there is sensitivity to all of those factors which guarantee reliability in the different stages of obtaining data: clarification of the term ‘corpus’; reflection on approaches to the field and to orality, and on representativeness (both in terms of genres and numbers of speakers); data elicitation practices and transcription.

The PAC project (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure) aims at giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and its geographical, social and stylistic diversity. Based on Labovian methods, the project seeks to describe both rhotic and non rhotic accents of English, from traditional standards to more recent postcolonial varieties. This large corpus enables researchers to analyse and compare intervarietal features such as rhoticity as well as more specific phenomena such as vocalic length in Australian English or variable rhoticity in New Zealand English. Today LVTI, a collaborative project aiming at an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic survey of great urban centres such as Manchester and Toulouse is being set up following the PAC/PFC classical protocol.

This article presents the structure of the Corpus International Ecologique de la Langue Française, an extensive corpus of spoken French that will soon be available on the Internet, from both an epistemological and empirical perspective. Explanations are given with regard to the ideas that guided the data collection (ecological approach, comparability of the different areas of the Francophonie and communication situations) and to the choices made ("communicative spaces" and "activity types") with a view to relevant analyses in various research fields (variation, interaction, multimodality, French in contact, oral syntax) and an attempt is made to fill existing gaps in the current corpus. The article further addresses the issue of building up a network of experts, problems that had to be solved during fieldwork in the different areas and questions concerning standardisation, archiving and publication of the collected data (audio and video recordings, transcriptions, metadata), whereupon several examples are presented for comparative analyses.