"Instrumentos lingüísticos y políticas lingüísticas: la construcción del francés" ["Linguistic Tools and Linguistic Policies: The Construction of French"]

This paper analyzes the linguistic policies and tools that made the construction of the French language historically possible. In the first place, it reviews the criteria established by canonical dating to record the history of French, identifying them as political and literary rather than linguistic. In this respect, the hypothesis is put forward that the French model of linguistic policy should be described in terms of (a) the consolidation of the monarchy and its efforts to impose the king’s dialect as the standard variety and (b) the grammatization of French by the central power and civil society. Finally, it analyzes a series of linguistic tools used until the nineteenth century to normalize French and discusses the intervention of ideological state apparatuses to spread this distinct grammatization process.