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Koinéisation in medieval times may have involved the emergence in Paris of a new, relatively stable mixture of dialect features, but it did not entail homogeneity, as we have seen. Persistent and often violent demographic fluctuation in the ‘proto-industrial period’ favoured more variation in language, not less. The first explicit moves to suppress such variation and establish a standard language come with the Renaissance, and it is the process of disentangling standard and vernacular in the speech of the early modern city which will provide the focus for Part 3. In the fourteenth century, according to Hohenberg and Lees (1985), European cities entered a new stage of development, which lasted until the onset of industrialisation four hundred years later. The feature of proto-industrial development that impacts most on the sociolinguistic situation in Paris is an increase in hierarchical thought, which widens the gulf between the culture and life-style of the elites and those of the population at large. This is compounded in Renaissance Europe by the spread of literacy, which accentuates the divergence between the written culture of the elites and the traditional oral culture of the masses. A new polarity crystallises in the social psychology of the city, setting ‘urbanity’ against ‘rusticity’. In this new cultural setting, Latin is progressively restricted to its religious functions, and variation within the vernacular takes on a social importance that it appears not to have had previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tried to show in Chapter 4 how a specific français de Paris may have developed initially through a process of koinéisation in the social and linguistic melting-pot of the medieval city. In this chapter we will see what information may be gleaned from contemporary written documents. If we follow the quantitative methodology pioneered by A. Dees, we might be able to discern in the writing system used in medieval Parisian documents distant traces of the dialect-mixing and variation characteristic of medieval Parisian speech. We will conclude the chapter with general remarks on the city's sociolinguistic structure at the end of the thirteenth century. Although Paris was not a port-city with colonies of speakers drawn from widely scattered areas of the known world, in the thirteenth century it became a dialect melting-pot, and has continued to be one ever since. It attracted relatively large numbers of English-speakers, Flemish-speakers, Italian-speakers, Latin-speakers (see Beaulieux 1927: 112–26), but the most important element in the formation of its patterns of speech was the constant flow, in and out of the city, of speakers of other north Gallo-Romance dialects like Picard, Champenois and Norman, and, of course, HDP. It has been observed that in bourgeoning cities in the modern world, high levels of in-migration and population-mixing induce a corresponding level of dialect-mixing, which may lead eventually to koinéisation (see Manessy 1994: 23). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter let us look at the development of Paris as an urban community in the medieval or, to use Hohenberg and Lees's term, the ‘pre-industrial’ period, before considering the city's sociolinguistic development in Chapter 4. We must examine particularly the city's changing demography at this time and its relations with the hinterland populations. The chronology of events needs to be considered carefully, for significant dialect development in the city can only have occurred in conjunction with rapid population change. The early history The site of Paris has seen continuous human occupation for a very long time: traces of settlement have been found on the Ile-de-la-Cité, dating back some 4,000 years (Duval 1961: 43). The city appears to owe its earliest existence to the presence of an important overland route which in Neolithic times passed across the plains and plateaux of northern France from the Low Countries to the Loire and Aquitaine, and which found in the Ile-de-la-Cité the most suitable crossing-point on the Seine (see Planhol 1994: 247–8). The city's subsequent development was determined by the exceptional fertility of the plain situated north of the Seine, and by the fact that the city found itself in an area where several rivers converge (notably the Marne and the Oise with the Seine). It is no doubt for this hydrological reason that Paris's hinterland came to be referred to as the ‘Ile-de-France’ (see Bloch 1913: 9–10). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]