The limits of the Touraine dialect’s extension
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33910/1992-6464-2026-220-299-309Keywords:
history of the French language, historical dialectology, limits of extension, Touraine dialect, scriptaAbstract
Introduction. This article examines the Touraine dialect’s position within historical dialectology, linguistic geography, and scriptology, seeking to determine the limits of its extension. The relevance of the study stems from the sustained interest among linguists in the history of the French language, particularly through the lens of modern theoretical and methodological frameworks: scriptology, the ‘new’ history of the French language, and diasystemic research into French. The position of the Touraine dialect remains contested in various classifications of Old French dialects: while some researchers align the Touraine region with the zone of the Burgundian dialect, others include it in the group of the north-western, western, and west-central dialects.
Materials and Methods. The study employs a combination of methods: comparison, description, and classification, alongside phonetic and grammatical text analysis. The research material comprises French manuscripts from the Old-French period (9th–13th centuries).
Results. The findings indicate that the Touraine dialect has not previously been the subject of a dedicated study; the limits of its extension have not been established; and its specific linguistic features remain unidentified. An analysis of the literature on historical dialectology highlights the theoretical and methodological importance of distinguishing between language and writing, dialect and scriptа, and the text of a work and the text of a manuscript. The shared linguistic features of manuscripts created in a certain area depend on both the specific dialect and scripta. The article also discusses the results of dialectological studies on modern French. Special attention is paid to the sociolinguistic status of the Touraine dialect.
Conclusions. The territory of the diocese of Tours, which included the scriptoria of Touraine, primarily defines the scriptural limits of Touraine. The dialect zone of the Touraine dialect is determined by data from linguistic investigations into modern French. In modern French, the Touraine dialect zone is divided into northern and southern parts; the northern part falls within the Francien dialect zone, while the southern part belongs to the zone of the western dialects’ extension.
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