The archives of Jean Psichari and Hubert Pernot preserved in Paris and Athens show how the wo French linguists anticipated the methods of sociolinguistics and sociophonoetics. Their missions to Chios are now known thanks to documents that are in the process of being published: a set of handwritten cards by Psichari (1886) and the sound recordings made by Pernot in 1898-1899. These recordings were found and identified in 2011 in Paris and in 2020 in Geneva. The Psichari files show that Psichari developed a method combining phonetics and ethnographic and social study. Particularly, he gave importance to stigmatisation and phonetic variations according to context. Pernot's investigations show a similar interest in the contexts of Chios. But experimental phonetics applied to the dialects of Chios distanced Pernot from sociolinguistics. Psichari and Pernot's research in Chios gave rise to specific musical and literary productions. For Psichari, phonetics and linguistics formed the basis of a new literary language that would bring science and art together and create a national language. The collection of 114 Mélodies populaires de l'île de Chio, by Pernot and Paul Le Flem, was similarly used for artistic and political purposes by French musicologists who wanted to combat the Ottoman Empire and create a new musical language.