- Des parlers d’oïl à la francophonie: contact, variation et changement linguistiques ed. par Andreas Dufter, Klaus Grübl et Thomas Scharinger
The colloquium from which this valuable and well-executed volume is derived was held at the University of Munich in 2016, the fourth in the series ‘Repenser l’histoire du français’ launched by Maria Iliescu and the late David Trotter in 2007. True to the ethos of the series, the volume, which presents selected and significantly reworked papers from the colloquium, strives to showcase innovative approaches to the history of French while covering a broad diachronic and geographical range that extends from the medieval chan-sons de geste to the use of French in Scandinavia and the role of western French Oïl dialects in the formation of French creoles. Contributors draw on a range of electronic corpora and on newly exploited textual sources — notably, personal correspondence — that give enhanced access to informal and non-standard usage, including that of semi-literate speakers, and enable a richer understanding of the presence and role of linguistic variation and language contact in the history of French. The initial section is devoted to the development of the written norm in the course of the medieval period and the associated levelling of the dialects of Old French and elimination from the written language of regionally marked features. Literary texts are used to give insights into the breakdown of the two-case system in situations of linguistic contact (Zinaïda Geylikman), and into the resistance, in Picard-speaking areas, to the increasingly Latinate vocabulary and syntax associated with ‘pre-humanist’ prose (Annie Bertin), while Julie Glikman uses a combination of a diachronic survey of metalinguistic comments with use of a range of corpora and speaker surveys to elucidate the history and continued vitality of the (now) nonstandard conjunctions ‘malgré que’ and ‘à cause que’. A second section focuses on the social and geographical expansion of French, with particular reference to its use as a second or vehicular language both within and outside France. These contexts include early modern Geneva, where the influence of purist Parisian usage can already be detected by the end of the seventeenth century (Andres Kristol), and Languedoc-Roussillon, where the early diffusion of standard French is attested in an extensive corpus of letters written by soldiers with limited literacy serving in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century armies (Joachim Steffen). Previously unstudied epistolary corpora and diplomatic dispatches provide new evidence of the role of French in Scandinavia (Juhani Härmä) and Ottoman Palestine (Clémentine Rubio). The final section is devoted to the relationship between [End Page 665] French creoles and the Oïl dialects that underpin them historically (Sibylle Kriegel, Ralph Ludwig, and Stefan Pfänder), and on the interplay between North American varieties and variation within France (France Martineau and Wim Remysen; Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh and Julia Mitko). The volume is distinguished throughout by the novelty of the approaches on offer and the freshness of the documentary and other evidence adduced; a large number of contributors draw attention, with gratitude, to the careful work of the readers and editors during the process of revision, which further underlines the quality and value of the volume. [End Page 666]