This is an original and highly interesting contribution to the study of questions of linguistic insecurity, correctness and authority, taking the French language of France as a case study. All the quotations have been translated into English making the volume accessible to anyone interested in linguistic attitudes and ideologies (especially standard language ideology, prescriptivism and purism). The main analysis centres on two comparisons. First, there is a diachronic comparison (by far the longest part, chapters 4-6), which contrasts a nineteenth-century printed corpus of language commentary, Le Courrier de Vaugelas (Courrier, 1868-1881) and a twenty-first century online corpus, the Courrier des internautes (Internautes, 2011-2017); both publish readers’ questions and the answers provided by language “experts”, in the first case by Éman Martin, who describes himself as a “former specialised teacher of foreigners”, and in the second by members of the French Academy’s Service du Dictionnaire. This comparison is particularly valuable since the nineteenth century has been relatively neglected by historians of French, mistakenly considering that it hardly differs, if at all, from contemporary French. These works – noteworthy because of their dialogic nature – are situated within the wider metalinguistic tradition of remarks and observations on the French language and discussions of French in the press, an early example of which is Domergue’s Journal de la language françoise (1784-1795). Second, there is a synchronic comparison (chapter 7) of two twenty-first century websites, Langue sauce piquante (LSP, 2004-2017) and Bescherelle ta mère (BTM, 2018-2019), which contain blog posts and user comments; these corpora differ in that LSP is run by two proof-readers from Le Monde and mainly focuses on language used in the media, whereas BTM is a website, Facebook and Twitter/X account which displays images of language “errors” made by all sorts of people and institutions. In the latter case especially, we access not just “expert” opinion, but also the views of what Humphries terms the “audience”, comprising a mixture of experts, language enthusiasts and “ordinary” people, or “the relatively untapped ‘middle space’ of language commentary” (p. 2), situated between the top-down views of the elite and institutions, as reflected in metalinguistic texts, and language history from below, as evidenced in ego-documents. Indeed, online the question of authority is much more complex, with those writing from a perceived “expert” position not necessarily being “expert” in a traditional sense.

There is a considerable amount of continuity between the sources in the types of questions they discuss, the authorities they cite, the ideologies they espouse, and the tropes and imagery they employ to express their ideas and opinions. However, discourse features which are either absent or rare in the Courrier and Internautes, in particular humour, extreme imagery, and the targeting of individual users, are prominent in BTM (p. 202). Chapter 4 discusses the similarities and differences between the linguistic topics discussed in the Courrier and Internautes: it would be fascinating to compare these with the proportions given for the remarqueurs in Ayres-Bennett and Seijido (Reference Ayres-Bennett and Seijido2011). Humphries notes that specific topics also recur, citing the examples of je ne sache pas que, aspirated h and expletive ne, and suggests it would be interesting to explore these continuities further. I would argue that a broader historical sweep would also be valuable – especially given the explicit reference to Vaugelas in the title of the Courrier – since the pronunciation of h aspiré is already discussed in a series of remarks by Vaugelas (Reference Vaugelas1647: 1-3, 73, 194-202), and in an observation entitled ‘Retranchemens vicieux’, Andry de Boisregard (Reference Andry de Boisregard1693: 325-326) criticises the omission of ne explétif after the verb craindre. Many of the differences can be explained, as Humphries rightly notes, by the differing historical and socio-cultural contexts in which the works were produced. For instance, reflecting the nineteenth-century preoccupation with historical and comparative linguistics, Martin frequently has recourse to etymology in his replies. Humphries concludes that in the twenty-first century, and notably in BTM, linguistic prescriptivism has become part of popular culture.

Humphries employs methodologies from historical sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication skilfully and appropriately. She gives clear and concise definitions of all her key terms, although I was not entirely convinced by the model of prescriptivist texts (p. 18) adapted from McLelland (Reference McLelland, Ayres-Bennett and Bellamy2021). For instance, it is not clear to me that grammars have more perceived authority than dictionaries, or that online language advice services have greater reach than online dictionaries. On the whole, the volume is beautifully produced and I noticed very few typos, the most significant of which is the misnumbering in the reference to some of the examples in Chapter 4. These are, however, very minor quibbles and do nothing to detract from the volume’s undoubted contribution to our understanding of linguistic attitudes and ideologies, both within France and indeed beyond.