This doctor’s thesis aims at discussing the programs in dialect on the Alsatian public television network (France 3 Alsace), from 1966 to 2008. The following questions are dealt with: what sense does their presence make, since most of the regional audience understands one or more standard languages? To what extent do these programs reflect the regional multilingualism? What do they show of the Alsatian region, especially through the use of the dialects? This study is based on a corpus of more than 2000 programs archived by the National Audiovisual Institute (INA), which we introduce by telling the story of the regional television. After building a theoretical framework mixing linguistic and sociologic approaches, we discuss the methodological issues about how to define a « dialectal program », and which ones are going to be analysed in a (socio)linguistic way. We then proceed to the formal and linguistic analysis of a selection of 7 programs that are transcripted and commented on with a special focus on social representations, in order to get answers to our main research questions.
