Did ‘diaglossia’ exist in the history of Gallo-Romance?
Résumé
This paper seeks to ascertain the existence of a type C situation (‘diaglossia’ in Auer’s terminology), so frequent in other linguistic areas (Italian, German), at some point in the history of Gallo-Romance. To this end, we will examine new lexical data found in a corpus comprised of original unpublished sources, which includes accounts, records, personal correspondence and minutes, written between the 17th and the 18th century in Upper Normandy. The fact that the local range of this type of documentation has proven to be closely linked to the presence of regionalisms forces us to consider the following question, to which this communication will try to provide an answer: are regionalisms that prove to be dialect borrowings only temporary transfers from one language to another or are these borrowings rather stable? May they be considered as evidence of a more widely used inter-linguistic code? Most of the time, traditional sources such as literature, lexicography and regional glossaries do not contain the borrowings in question for the specified period. Therefore, one may be tempted to think that these loan words were in fact part of a more or less spontaneous code-switching stage bound to disappear shortly. As a matter of fact, beyond traditional sources, we believe that linguistic criteria strictly speaking need to be taken into consideration in order to establish such an assertion. For instance, we shall evaluate whether some of the loan words that we found in our corpus were borrowed at an early period when French was spreading, and if they went through changes that are known to be French or on the contrary, whether they exclusively followed a dialectal development through time. Thus, we wish to determine if chronological depth and degree of adaptation regarding three chosen borrowings may render a type C situation plausible in a specific area of northern Gallo-Romania.
Domaines
Linguistique
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