A major study on the evolution of the spelling of surnames will be carried out starting in 2021 in collaboration with the Centre for Linguistics and Language Sciences of the University of Lausanne, thanks to a CROSS funding.
The sources covered will include censuses, civil status records and business directories from 1887 onwards. HTR (handwritten text recognition) technologies will be used to extract the data. The aim of the research, apart from the development of automatic extraction technologies, is to trace the evolution of surnames in Lausanne. This is part of a broader perspective of studying the evolution of languages, since the historical spellings of names can also provide valuable clues about the pronunciation of French at the time.