ABSTRACT
The Mid.F. developments which were still taking place in the sixteenth century have for the most part been already dealt with in the previous chapter. The main emphasis in the present chapter will be not on internal changes but rather on attitudes towards language, for the sixteenth is the first century in which the French language was discussed as a possible rival and successor to Latin, and the first century in which attempts were made to describe it, analyse it, legislate for it, compare it in detail with other languages, and speculate about its origins. Furthermore, although to an increasing extent French had, since the thirteenth century, been one of the languages used for official purposes, it was not until the sixteenth that it was recognised as the official language, to the exclusion of Latin and provincial languages or dialects.
