Resumen de Jean de Joinville and the Old French rhotic consonant

Peter Chekin

• Based on textual evidence from Jean de Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis, this article argues that the Old French rhotic consonant /r/ had a dorsal pronunciation for at least some groups of medieval Francophones. This argument counters the prevailing view that medieval French /r/ was uniformly apical, and that the now-standard dorsal pronunciation only emerged in the early modern period. The article then develops the hypothesis that dorsal /r/ came into Old French as a result of Germanic influence, and not as a spontaneous development. For this purpose, it first surveys the current state of the debate about the origins of dorsal /r/ in the Germanic languages and evaluates the merits of its principal arguments in the light of Joinville’s testimony. The article then advances a sociolinguistic argument in favor of the Germanic-origins hypothesis. Using the available evidence for the interactions between Germanic- and Romance-speakers at the dawn of the written French language, it proposes that Carolingian-era nobles who were native speakers of Franconian dialects brought this pronunciation of /r/ into Old French, and that this sound subsequently persisted in some Old French aristocratic speech as part of a prestige accent.