lingénierie

Lingénierie is a neologism used in some French-speaking contexts to describe the intersection of linguistics and engineering, focused on designing and building language-enabled technologies and systems. As a partly informal label, it highlights the practical integration of linguistic knowledge with software development and infrastructure.

The term blends linguistic expertise with engineering practice. It is not standardized in academic curricula and tends to appear in industry discourse, startups, and some research reports to emphasize interdisciplinary work rather than denote a formal discipline.

Lingénierie covers a range of applications, including natural language processing, computational linguistics, speech processing, language data engineering, localization and translation pipelines, and user interfaces that operate with spoken or written language. It addresses both linguistic modeling and the engineering of end-user systems, from data collection to deployment.

In practice, projects labeled as lingénierie combine linguistic analysis, corpus methods, algorithm design, software engineering, data pipelines, and evaluation, with attention to usability and reliability.

Relation to established fields: It overlaps with NLP, language technology, software engineering, and information science. In most contexts it is not a separate academic discipline but a frame for interdisciplinary work, research programs, or product development.

Critique and notes: Because it is informal, the term can be ambiguous; for precise communication, it is common to specify the exact domain, such as NLP or computational linguistics.

See also: linguistics; engineering; natural language processing; computational linguistics; language technology.