This study has aimed to shed fresh light on the richness and diversity of usage in seventeenth-century France. A second purpose throughout has been to address fundamental methodological questions. While some of these are pertinent to the study of variation in general, others are particularly acute when we are analysing past variation. In this final chapter, I would like to return to some of these general questions and methodological issues.

A major preoccupation throughout has been the question of sources. Traditional histories of French, which focus on the emergence of the standard language – symbolized in the seventeenth century by the birth of the French Academy and the triumph of le bon usage – have inevitably relied heavily on literary texts. Literary sources have not been neglected in this book, and the frantext corpus has proved especially useful in affording access to a large corpus of literary texts that can be used, for example, to provide statistical information about frequency of usage. However, the investigation of variation, of the non-standard, necessarily requires the examination of different types of texts and other kinds of sources, including comparative reconstruction.

The reconstruction of seventeenth-century spoken French using the comparative method is at once highly promising and fraught with potential problems.