Abstract

Concerning the history of the linguistic standardisation of French, the period which begins with Louis XIV and the 17th century is well known and has been well documented.However, to the present day, discussions about the origins and the early periods of standardisation often suffer from a lack of intralinguistic evidence. The present article makes some suggestions which are designed to help compensate for this lack of evidence, and discusses some results from a German research project on Old French charters.