Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Anglo-Norman: New Themes, New Contexts
- 2 Later Anglo-Norman as a Contact Variety of French?
- 3 The Sources of Standardisation in French – Written or Spoken?
- 4 Husbonderie and Manaungerie in Later Medieval England: A Tale of Two Walters
- 5 Bridging the Gap: The (Socio)linguistic Evidence of Some Medieval English Bridge Accounts
- 6 From Apareil to Warderobe: Some Observations on Anglo-French in the Middle English Lexis of Cloth and Clothing
- 7 Languages in the Military Profession in Later Medieval England
- 8 The Language of the English Legal Profession: The Emergence of a Distinctive Legal Lexicon in Insular French
- 9 Mapping Insular French Texts? Ideas for Localisation and Correlated Dialectology in Manuscript Materials of Medieval England
- 10 A Pilot Study on the Singular Definite Articles le and la in Fifteenth-Century London Mixed-Language Business Writing
- 11 Investigating Anglo-Norman Influence on Late Middle English Syntax
- 12 The Transmission of Later Anglo-Norman: Some Syntactic Evidence
- Index
3 - The Sources of Standardisation in French – Written or Spoken?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Anglo-Norman: New Themes, New Contexts
- 2 Later Anglo-Norman as a Contact Variety of French?
- 3 The Sources of Standardisation in French – Written or Spoken?
- 4 Husbonderie and Manaungerie in Later Medieval England: A Tale of Two Walters
- 5 Bridging the Gap: The (Socio)linguistic Evidence of Some Medieval English Bridge Accounts
- 6 From Apareil to Warderobe: Some Observations on Anglo-French in the Middle English Lexis of Cloth and Clothing
- 7 Languages in the Military Profession in Later Medieval England
- 8 The Language of the English Legal Profession: The Emergence of a Distinctive Legal Lexicon in Insular French
- 9 Mapping Insular French Texts? Ideas for Localisation and Correlated Dialectology in Manuscript Materials of Medieval England
- 10 A Pilot Study on the Singular Definite Articles le and la in Fifteenth-Century London Mixed-Language Business Writing
- 11 Investigating Anglo-Norman Influence on Late Middle English Syntax
- 12 The Transmission of Later Anglo-Norman: Some Syntactic Evidence
- Index
Summary
Introduction
For sociopolitical reasons Anglo-Norman was related closely to the Norman dialect during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For commercial reasons it was also closely related to Picard, at least until the end of the thirteenth century. The importance of the Parisian dialect for Anglo-Norman developed only in the thirteenth century, which must be related to the fact that, by this time, Paris had emerged as the largest conurbation in western Europe; the power and wealth concentrated there gave its form of speech unrivalled prestige. Although it took several centuries for Parisian written forms to completely displace regional writing systems in the French provinces, it started to have a formative influence in the late thirteenth century and eventually of course became the French standard language. In order to appreciate the impact the French of Paris had on later Anglo-Norman, it is important to understand something about how it emerged. This question raises issues which are highly contentious in France, thanks to the role of the standard language in definitions of French identity and nationhood. Did the embryonic standard language develop initially in writing, and defuse subsequently through Parisian speech before moving out to the provinces? Or did it crystallise initially in Parisian speech before being reflected in the Parisian writing system? For reasons which are not clear, it took Paris a long time to develop a writing system of its own: very few non-Latin texts, known to have been produced in Paris, survive from before the mid-thirteenth century. This paper addresses those alternatives, investigating whether speech or writing was the matrix of the embryonic standard French language.
The origins of standardisation in French raise some of the most refractory problems in the history of that language.
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- The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts , pp. 26 - 43Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010
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