The sixty French texts edited here are all direct commentaries, by contemporary authors, on the French language in the 17th century. By this time, French had be

Incorporating a description of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Gaul, and the earliest recorded forms of French, the development of the French language through the la

This new history of the French language allows the reader to see how the language has evolved for themselves. It combines texts and extracts with a readable and

This book provides a systematic study of sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a range of case studies, Wendy Ayres-Bennett makes