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.