Il termine "handicap" nei discorsi istituzionali francesi: categorizzazione e inclusione scolastica tra diritto e scuola

In recent years, French school policies have adopted an explicitly inclusive orientation, closely linked to legislative developments on disability. From an information science perspective, institutional naming practices are not neutral: terms used in public documents operate as knowledge organization devices, stabilizing operational categories, shaping administrative procedures, and regulating access to educational resources and support measures. This article examines the French term handicap as a documentary category, reconstructing its legal definition and tracing its semantic shifts within school-related institutional documents. The corpus combines key legal texts (1957, 1975, 2005) with ministerial documents on école inclusive published since 2013. Drawing on sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, the study shows how handicap functions both as a rights-bearing legal category and as an expandable documentary label applied to heterogeneous school situations, producing effects of documentary equivalence and naturalization of social and linguistic differences.