Résumé
The Phonetics Laboratory of Montpellier, founded in 1904 by Maurice Grammont, offers a compelling case of early institutionalization of experimental phonetics in France, outside the central academic hubs of Paris and Grenoble. Emerging during a period of technological advancement in speech analysis, the Montpellier laboratory distinguished itself through its dual orientation-both educational and experimental. Equipped with state-of-the-art instruments for the time, it enabled the physiological, articulatory, and acoustic study of spoken language. Maurice Grammont gave the laboratory a unique identity at the crossroads of comparative linguistics, dialectology, and instrumental phonetics. Following Grammont's retirement, the laboratory entered a period of gradual decline. Scientific research activities were abandoned, and phonetics continued only as a subject taught in literature and language programs. Over time, much of the equipment was lost or scattered, and the laboratory ceased to exist as a formal institutional structure. However, a scientific revival began in the early 2000s-not through the reactivation of the original laboratory, but via the integration of phonetic research into new interdisciplinary research units. This renewal brought updated tools and contemporary themes such as prosody, speech disorders, and corpus phonetics.