Linguistic features of Easy French ( Facile à lire et à comprendre ) – A corpus-based study

FALC ( Facile à lire et à comprendre ) is a variety of French, designed to make texts more accessible. The French government promotes the use of FALC for health communication and electoral campaigns. Although societal awareness is increasing and research interest is growing, data scarcity remains a problem. This paper presents one of the first large corpora on FALC, containing over 100,000 words and compiled based on a clear corpus design. The corpus is analyzed with a focus on lexis and syntax, and the results are compared to standard French reference corpora. This analysis reveals several linguistic features of FALC that partially align with the recommendations in the guidelines published by Inclusion Europe, but in some cases also contradict them. For example, while sentences are indeed shorter, the number of negations is higher.