Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century French: Methodology and case studies

Extract

Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century French: Methodology and case studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xii, 267. Hb $95.00

Wendy Ayres-Bennett (WAB hereafter) is a British French-language scholar, well known to philologists and historical grammarians. She is an authority on 17th-century language matters, in particular on Vaugelas and the remarqueurs (authors of observations on le bon usage, destined for those wishing to speak good French at a time when it was the mother tongue of a minority living in France). In this most recent contribution, she departs from preconceived ideas and typical disciplinary boundaries by using sociolinguistics to look at the history of the language in a project that brings to mind the work of Milroy 1992 on English and Lodge 1993, 2004 on French.