L’Histoire du français: état des lieux et perspectives ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett et Thomas M. Rainsford (review)

The history of the French language, charting the affiliation between the modern language and its classical forebear, was a key element in French studies from the discipline’s inception until quite recently. It has now all but vanished from the syllabus in UK universities; not so in continental Europe, where the subject is alive and kicking and feeding valuable new insights and material into contemporary ideas on linguistic change, as this volume amply demonstrates. The Société internationale de diachronie du français was set up in 2008 to inject a greater measure of rigorous linguistic thinking into the long-established genre of the histoire de la langue. This volume contains the reworked versions of nineteen papers presented at the Société’s first conference, held in Nancy in 2011. The editors have toiled hard, and not unsuccessfully, to make of a disparate set of conference papers a coherent whole, distributing them into three sections: ‘États des lieux’, ‘Méthodologie’, and ‘Perspectives’. The first of these was evidently the most difficult to structure and offers a set of interesting essays on a range of topics (morpho-syntax, lexis, codification, and dialectology) arranged chronologically from the twelfth century to the present. Richard Ingham’s paper on the linguistic status of Anglo-Norman deserves mention for its attempt to combat the traditional hierarchization of the regional varieties of medieval French, although the most substantial contribution is provided by Andres Max Kristol on the relevance of synchronic dialectology for the understanding of linguistic change. The second section deals primarily with the central problem of historical linguistics — that of data and its evaluation. Several of the papers here consider the wealth of historical data contained in the dictionaries of French compiled since the sixteenth century and the problems raised as we exploit this material to enhance our vision of linguistic change in French. Aude Wirth-Jaillard makes an important point as she draws attention to the material stored in the provincial archives of France and the ways in which this can rebalance a medieval database, traditionally over-dependent on more easily accessible literary data. The third section of the book is intellectually the most challenging, for it deals with the general, theoretical problems of language change. Peter Koch’s article, ‘Phases et charnières’, is the fruit of years of reflection on the dichotomy, probably universal across natural languages, between the Distanzspracheand the Nähesprache. The author uses this opposition to create a useful typology for charting the historical evolution of a wide range of languages. Throughout this volume, however, there is degree of reluctance to engage with the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ theorizing about language change which, since the work of Uriel Weinreich in the 1960s, has pushed forward our thinking in this field a long way. Many of the theoretical issues raised were anticipated many years ago in, for instance, the WLH model of language change and could have assisted the endeavours of a number of the authors here.