Wendy Ayres-Bennett

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 detailed commentary allowing the language to be viewed both synchronically and diachronically.Core texts range from the ninth century to the present day …

Drawing on a range of case studies, this systematic study demonstrates the variety of language usage in seventeenth-century France, a time considered to be the most "standardizing" in the history of French. Variation is analyzed in terms of gender, age and socio-economic status, or by the medium, register or genre …