The Oxford Handbook of the French Language

Wendy Ayres-Bennett is Emerita Professor of French Philology and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on the history of French, sociohistorical linguistics, and the history of linguistic thought, and, more recently, on language standardization and language policy and planning. She was Principal Investigator (2016-2021) on the AHRC-funded multi-disciplinary research project, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, which promoted the value of languages for key issues of our time and explored the benefits of language learning for individuals and societies. An AHRC-funded follow-on project Promoting Language Policy provided research-based evidence for moving languages higher up the political agenda. Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has held visiting positions at Balliol College, Oxford and at Paris VIII. Her research has been funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the France Berkeley Fund, the Hellman Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Mairi McLaughlin: French and its varieties: Disciplinary perspectives and new horizons
Part I. Structures of French
1: Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie: Phonetics, phonology, and orthography
2: Mairi McLaughlin: Morphology and syntax
3: Richard Huyghe and Dominique Legallois: Semantics and pragmatics
Part II. History of French
4: Philippe Caron: External history of French
5: Wendy Ayres-Bennett: Language policy and planning
6: Olivia Walsh and Douglas Kibbee: Metalinguistic texts
7: Thomas Rainsford: Historical phonetics, phonology, and orthography
8: Sophie Prévost: Historical morphology and syntax
9: Sabine Lehmann: Historical semantics and pragmatics
Part III. Axes of variation
10: Nigel Armstrong: Age, gender, and social class
11: Jenelle Thomas: Register, genre, text type
12: Janice Carruthers: Spoken French
13: Rachel Panckhurst, Louise-Amélie Cougnon, and Cédrick Fairon: French digital discourse
Part IV. French around the world
14: Mathieu Avanzi: Regional variation in the French of France
15: André Thibault: Francophonie
16: Isabelle Racine: French in Europe
17: Barbara E. Bullock and Randall Gess: French in North America
18: Béatrice Akissi Boutin and Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue: French in Africa
Part V. French in contact with other languages
19: Maya Angela Eipe Smith: Multilingualism
20: Georg Kremnitz and Fañch Broudic: French and the languages of France
21: Nicolas Froeliger and Rudy Loock: Translation and interpreting
22: Thomas A. Klingler: Creoles
Part VI. Second language acquisition
23: Richard Kern: Where, when, and how French is learned
24: Sylvain Detey: Acquiring phonetics and phonology
25: Dalila Ayoun: Acquiring morphology and syntax
26: Henry Tyne and Martin Howard: Acquiring lexical, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic competence
Part VII. French in literature, culture, arts, and the media
27: Sophie Marnette: French language and literature in the Middle Ages
28: Gilles Siouffi: Early Modern French language and literature
29: Laurence Rosier: Contemporary French language and literature
30: Michaël Abecassis: French language and cinema
31: Claire Lesacher: French language and vocal music
32: Marcel Burger: French and the media