Le français parlé à Marseille et en Provence - Auguste Brun

Le français parlé à Marseille et en Provence - Auguste Brun
(French language spoken in Marseille and Provence)

"When a common language comes into being, as an official language, in an area where local dialects reign, as happened in the sixteenth century, in Provence, for French, the event opens a crisis, inaugurates a new era , Made up of actions and reactions, of conflicts, whose aspects and consequences can be multiple and varied.

In Provence, as in the whole of the South, archival documents show us that in many places the invasion of French determined, in the consciousness of the natives, a sort of linguistic perturbation. It is a period of such anarchy that it is often impossible to discern which of the two languages ​​the editor claimed to write. As far as the spoken language is concerned, this disorder lasts as long as there are inadequate environments. Today, in far-off villages, there are still peasants who express themselves as the scribes of the sixteenth century ...

[...] However, if we have studied French commonly, dialects, and slangs, regional French has been neglected so far, no doubt for the reason that grammarians have accustomed us to see in it only Aberrant formations, incorrectness, vicious locutions, fruits of ignorance .... (extract from the Preliminaries of the original edition of 1931).

The author:

Auguste Brun (1881-1961), born in Pau, an associate of grammar, doctor of letters and professor at the Faculty of Aix. He is indebted to various works of historical linguistics: Recherches sur l’Introduction du français dans les provinces du Midi ; L’Introduction du français en Béarn et en Roussillon ; La langue française en Provence, de Louis XIV au Félibrige ; France dialectale et Unité française. Parlers régionaux.