Letters from non-professional writers in sixteenth-century France and their linguistic importance

Abstract

The non-conventional spellings found in letters written in French before the 19th century by people whose business was not writing tend to be summarily dismissed as fautes d’orthographe, attributable to the ignorance and even lack of intelligence of the writer. Such attitudes have led to the discarding of potentially valuable material for investigating language variation in the past and for deepening our understanding of the multi-facetted process of sound change. Happily, linguists concerned with variation and change are now overthrowing this prejudice and have begun assembling corpora of such letters from the 17th and 18th centuries. Few texts of this type survive from earlier periods, but we shall see here that some are to be found in the personal letters sent to Marie de Guise, when she was queen and queen-regent in Scotland (1538–1560). In this essay we will look at one of them in detail, focusing on the non-conventional spellings we find there, to discover what they might tell us (a) about the writer’s spoken language and (b) about her approach to vernacular spelling. It looks as though the writer deliberately elaborated her own eclectic but highly coherent spelling system, through which she sought to express her individual social identity, in the same way as people seem always to have done with their personal hand-writing.