A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French

Conventional histories of the French language are unidimensional and standardoriented, treating language change in a social and demographic vacuum, and as a process in which ‘ordinary speakers’ do not participate. This book has shown, if nothing else, how the speech of Paris has evolved hand in hand with demographic and socio-economic change, howsocial differences and dialect-mixing have had a crucial role to play in language change, and how the development of the standard language in the city can only be fully understood in the context of the city’s vernacular.
Language-internal and endogenous explanations of language change may be effective in accounting for the development of ‘closed’ dialects spoken in remote and isolated areas. They are quite inadequate when we come to deal with the language of a great metropolis, where social factors and dialect-contact assume critical importance. Perhaps the general framework we have created may nowstimulate smaller-scale, more focused studies on some of the other historical sociolinguistic material in Paris which undoubtedly remains to be exploited.