Whilst carrying out his phonographic documentation project, Léon Azoulay took particular care to “have a text written in the speaker’s language read into the phonograph”. The chosen text was The Parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Saint Luke, which had been translated into almost every language in the world thanks to the British and Foreign Bible Society.
Azoulay documented this biblical text 57 times, including three versions in Breton. One was read by Aline Lebot, another by Corentin Pichavant, and the third by Pierre Laurent. These recordings allow the same biblical verses to be heard in three different Breton dialects: Léon, Bigouden and Vannetais. The Vannetais and Bigouden recordings are accompanied by transcripts of the parable. Corentin Pichavant’s written text is particularly valuable, as very few written records of The Parable of the Prodigal Son exist in Bigouden Breton, unlike the Vannetais and Léon versions.
Azoulay’s choice to use the Bible, the most translated text in the world, as a tool for documenting languages was part of an already established tradition. During the First Empire, in 1805, the French Bureau of Statistics had contacted 130 French prefectures, asking them to provide a version of The Parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Saint Luke in the department vernacular. The parable had been chosen because it was “rarely heard”, and because the simplicity of its expressions made it easy to translate into “the most primitive dialects of our language.”
Other major oral documentation initiatives followed the same approach. These included the work of Franz Joseph Stalder in Switzerland, Johan Winkler in the Netherlands, and a survey of 90 villages in the Savoie region organised by Alphonse Despine. Even the National Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Bordeaux took part in this tradition, with Édouard Bourciez documenting 4,444 versions of the parable. More recent initiatives continue along similar lines, such as the digital project Atlas linguistiques et Ethnographiques de Gascogne et Languedoc Occidental.
Translated by Tilly O'Neill
