Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French

This volume brings together two particularly dynamic areas of contemporary research on the French language. The chapters showcase the most innovative current scholarship in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and in the burgeoning field of historical sociolinguistics which lies at their intersection. The research across the volume is strongly data-centred, drawing on a wide range of both well-established and more novel theoretical and methodological approaches in order to open up new perspectives on the study of the French language in the twenty-first century. Although it is written in English, the work presented here is underpinned by a range of different approaches from across the Francophone and Anglophone worlds. Particular emphasis is placed on combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, on diversifying tools, methods, and objects of inquiry, and on adopting comparative and multilingual perspectives where these shed new light on important questions relating to French. In these ways, Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French highlights some of the most exciting new directions for linguistic research on the French language.

Janice Carruthers, Professor of French Linguistics, Queen's University Belfast,Mairi McLaughlin, Professor of French, University of California, Berkeley,Olivia Walsh, Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies, University of Nottingham

Janice Carruthers is Professor of French Linguistics at Queen's University Belfast. She has published widely on the temporal system of Modern French (tense, framing, connectives), the structure of oral narrative, French sociolinguistics, the syntax of Spoken French, corpus methodology, and language policy. She has also published two corpora of oral narrative, one in French and one, with Marianne Vergez-Couret (Poitiers), in Occitan. From 2017-2021 she was the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Priority Area Leadership Fellow for Modern Languages. Her research has been funded by the AHRC, Horizon 2020 (EU), and the British Academy.


Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has held visiting positions at Balliol College, Oxford and at Paris VIII. Her research has been funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the France Berkeley Fund, the Hellman Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.


Olivia Walsh is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include language ideologies and attitudes in the French language, with a particular interest in standardization and prescriptivism in France and the French-speaking world both in the past and in the current day and, most recently, the French-speaking community in the UK and the USA. Her first book, Linguistic Purism: Language Attitudes in France and Quebec, was published by John Benjamins (2016). Her other work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and the Journal of French Language Studies.

1. New directions in the history and sociolinguistics of French, Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin, and Olivia Walsh2. Proclisis and enclisis in early Gallo-Romance: Evidence from sandhi phenomena, Thomas Rainsford3. The grammar(s) of reported discourse in medieval French literature, Sophie Marnette4. The evolution of the syntax of the subject in French and factors of variation, Sophie Prévost5. The evolution of 'background' from Middle to pre-Classical French, Bernard Combettes6. Women and language in the Journal de la langue françoise (1784-1795), Mairi McLaughlin7. The French language and eighteenth-century Italian women: Language of vanity or language of scholarship?, Helena Sanson8. The construction of authority and community in French official correspondence from Spanish Louisiana, Jenelle Thomas9. Language authority, language ideologies, and eighteenth-century bilingual lexicographers of French, German and English: Comparing Abel Boyer, Christian Ludwig, and Lewis Chambaud, Nicola McLelland10. The history of terms for varieties of Gallo-Romance, Douglas A. Kibbee11. Elision, the neglected link in French phonology, John N. Green and Marie-Anne Hintze12. On the rise and fall of modern français régional in the rural Côte d'Or, Rosalind A. M. Temple13. Attitudes towards the French language: An analysis of the metalanguage used in twentieth-century French language columns, Olivia Walsh14. Comparing the prescriptivism of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century language experts in France, Emma Humphries15. Attitudes on Twitter towards French inclusive writing, Anna Tristram16. Breton dictionaries and contemporary corpus planning: Vocabulary and purism in the minoritized languages of France, Merryn Davies-Deacon17. France and its difficult relationship with foreign languages, Philippe Caron18. Minoritized languages in France and Ireland: Policy, practice, vitality, Janice Carruthers and Mícheál B. � Mainnín