Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-Century France

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 used. The case studies present phonological morphological syntactic and lexical issues posing a range of methodological questions for sociolinguists and historical linguists.