This volume showcases the most innovative current scholarship in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and in the burgeoning field of historical sociolinguistics which lies at their intersection. The work is underpinned by a range of different approaches and highlights new directions for linguistic research on the French language.

1: Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin, and Olivia Walsh: New directions in the history and sociolinguistics of French 2: Thomas Rainsford: Proclisis and enclisis in early Gallo-Romance: Evidence from sandhi phenomena 3: Sophie Marnette: The grammar(s) of reported discourse in medieval French literature 4: Sophie Prévost: The evolution of the syntax of the subject in French and factors of variation 5: Bernard Combettes: The evolution of 'background' from Middle to pre-Classical French 6: Mairi McLaughlin: Women and language in the Journal de la langue françoise (1784-1795) 7: Helena Sanson: The French language and eighteenth-century Italian women: Language of vanity or language of scholarship? 8: Jenelle Thomas: The construction of authority and community in French official correspondence from Spanish Louisiana 9: Nicola McLelland: Language authority, language ideologies, and eighteenth-century bilingual lexicographers of French, German and English: Comparing Abel Boyer, Christian Ludwig, and Lewis Chambaud 10: Douglas A. Kibbee: The history of terms for varieties of Gallo-Romance 11: John N. Green and Marie-Anne Hintze: Elision, the neglected link in French phonology 12: Rosalind A. M. Temple: On the rise and fall of modern français régional in the rural Côte d'Or 13: Olivia Walsh: Attitudes towards the French language: An analysis of the metalanguage used in twentieth-century French language columns 14: Emma Humphries: Comparing the prescriptivism of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century language experts in France 15: Anna Tristram: Attitudes on Twitter towards French inclusive writing 16: Merryn Davies-Deacon: Breton dictionaries and contemporary corpus planning: Vocabulary and purism in the minoritized languages of France 17: Philippe Caron: France and its difficult relationship with foreign languages 18: Janice Carruthers and Mícheál B. Ó Mainnín: Minoritized languages in France and Ireland: Policy, practice, vitality

Janice Carruthers is Professor of French Linguistics at Queen's University Belfast. She has published widely on the temporal system of Modern French (tense, framing, connectives), the structure of oral narrative, French sociolinguistics, the syntax of Spoken French, corpus methodology, and language policy. She has also published two corpora of oral narrative, one in French and one, with Marianne Vergez-Couret (Poitiers), in Occitan. From 2017-2021 she was the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Priority Area Leadership Fellow for Modern Languages. Her research has been funded by the AHRC, Horizon 2020 (EU), and the British Academy. Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has held visiting positions at Balliol College, Oxford and at Paris VIII. Her research has been funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the France Berkeley Fund, the Hellman Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Olivia Walsh is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include language ideologies and attitudes in the French language, with a particular interest in standardization and prescriptivism in France and the French-speaking world both in the past and in the current day and, most recently, the French-speaking community in the UK and the USA. Her first book, Linguistic Purism: Language Attitudes in France and Quebec, was published by John Benjamins (2016). Her other work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and the Journal of French Language Studies.

Combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of French Incorporates comparative and multilingual perspectives into work on a global language Draws on extensive spoken and written data from a diverse range of sources