Detailed longitudinal studies of urban sociolinguistic change are few and far between. They are intrinsically difficult and of vast scope and pose severe theoretical and methodological problems concerning the availability and reliability of data. Lodge's survey of how the speech of Paris “has evolved hand in hand with demographic and socio-economic change” (p. 250), over some 800 years, is a largely convincing attempt to overcome these problems.

Theoretically, Lodge draws on the British sociolinguistic tradition associated with Trudgill, using analytical terms such as “koinéisation”, “dialect-levelling”, and “reallocation”. He also looks to the Milroys on language and social networks, and in an excellent account of argot in nineteenth-century Paris, to Halliday on “anti-language.” Labov figures prominently and Gumperz puts in an appearance, but otherwise the U.S. tradition of linguistic anthropology, which might have provided an entrée to some key questions, is missing, as is the extensive corpus of transatlantic writing on language and gender. For a socio-historical framework Lodge turns to Hohenberg & Lees 1985, who proposed three phases of urban development in Europe: pre-industrial (eleventh–fourteenth centuries), proto-industrial (fifteenth–eighteenth), and industrial (nineteenth–twentieth), though Lodge declines to take the story beyond about 1950. These epochs are, in effect, ideal type configurations of socio-demographic, economic, political and cultural change which Lodge uses to map and interpret sociolinguistic developments.

In both France and Britain, there was from the fourteenth century onward what might be called a “triple development” involving the rise of a standard literary language and language of state, the increasing separation of the spoken language into class and status-based varieties, and the consolidation of these at the expense of minority languages and dialects. Although some French writers have argued that the evolution of a written standard language was a crucial early development, Lodge contends that is unlikely that such a standard emerged first. He adopts instead a “spoken koiné hypothesis” which argues that “the earliest sources of standardisation in French are to be found not in a composite written variety elaborated at a very early date by a coterie of scribes, but in a dialect mixture which developed spontaneously through real-life interactions between speakers” (76). There is thus a complex dialectical relationship between the Paris vernacular, the written standard, and the spoken standard, and Lodge documents the changing form of this relationship from the twelfth century on.

“The speech of Paris”, says Lodge, “looks to have always been heterogeneous, with multilingualism, dialect-mixing, code-shifting and style-shifting taking place there as a matter of routine” (15), but one important change notably in the proto-industrial period was in the evaluation of these different ways of speaking. Of particular interest is Lodge's account of opposed “prototypes,” as he calls them, of the good and bad speaker, represented by the Gentleman (l'Honnête Homme) and the “Peasant,” who even if town-dwelling was not “urbane.” The Gentleman distinguished himself by avoiding low words, the words of trades, and legal jargon, “reject[ing] the vernacular in all its manifestations … distancing oneself as far as possible from ‘everyday’ modes of expression” (152–53). Under the Ancien Régime rigid social hierarchy went with rigid linguistic hierarchy, and furthermore, eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophies of language encouraged the belief that the vernacular signaled an “inability to think clearly and logically”(162). The industrial period in many ways carried forward these distinctions, albeit in other guises. After 1800 the gulf between high and low culture became more marked; the gradual expansion of public education spread the use of the emergent standard/national language and, inter alia, “lowered the levels of tolerance” for popular speech (210).

If it appears from this that Lodge is good on class, or rather social stratification, it must be said he is weak on gender and ethnicity and, aside from some remarks on politeness, says little about discursive practice. The omission of ethnic diversity seems to be the result of its relative absence from the social reality of Paris. Lodge argues that ethnic differentiation was not really important until after 1950, though perhaps he underestimates the significance of minority ethnic groups (e.g. Bretons), and of immigrants from outside France (e.g. Italians), in the second half of the nineteenth century. Paris always was to some degree polyglot, and, as Lodge puts it, a “mosaic of disparate groups struggling to maintain their identity” (200). It could, of course, be argued that gender difference, and women, are simply missing from the record, yet Lodge himself notes numerous examples which though scattered could be pulled together more systematically. Thus, the ideas that the douceur of courtly speech owed something to the presence of women, that hypercorrection and “assibillation” were attributed to female speakers, that the speaking of argot was associated with masculinity, and so on, all suggest that gender and class were complexly interrelated in both representation and (probably) practice, and that this requires further investigation.

The lack of direct evidence gathered by professional linguists (and until the twentieth century the lack of any audio material) means that the historical sociolinguist must “make the best of a very bad job” (249). “As soon as we come near the vernacular”, says Lodge, “it slips away, leaving only the faintest traces of its passage” (22). Even for the nineteenth century, the data are problematic, if more abundant. Lodge supplements the scanty direct evidence by gleaning what he can from indirect sources, including metalinguistic commentaries. In doing so he locates a wealth of fascinating texts which give clues to the evolving nature of the (often stigmatized) vernacular grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. A great deal of such data, however, is in texts which claim to represent low-class speech, and these are difficult to handle. On the one hand they may be read, with some difficulty, as evidence for the speech they purportedly represent; on the other they reveal how that speech was represented by others – how literate Parisians, for example, portrayed the speech of the illiterate, how they “heard” them, how they thought they spoke, or simply how they orthographically represented the vernacular. These representations of speech were often also representations of character, conveying what kind of people vernacular speakers were presumed to be. Lodge records “an enduring literary convention which made argot an indispensable component in any portrayal not only of the criminal fraternity, but of working-class males in general” (247). It represented their supposed masculinity. Often this meant denigrating or satirizing them, but sometimes, as in eighteenth-century pamphlets, vernacular forms were used to “express the voice of the Common Man” (211). Such mimesis is widespread and worth exploring in its own right.

“Writing a sociolinguistic history of a city as large and complex as Paris is a risky, even foolhardy undertaking,” says Lodge (3). Indeed, is such a history possible? Beyond the problem of data is the question of what kind of unity and community “Paris” or “Parisian French” represents. Anthropologists have frequently been skeptical about the validity of a spatially and sociologically distinct urban entity. This is especially pertinent in the contemporary, globalized, transnational world where cities and societies are increasingly “porous,” to use Charles Taylor's term, but surely it was ever an issue in cities such as Paris which to a degree always were “global cities.” Speakers of Parisian French have always been a finite but unbounded community. They may be habitually resident in the agglomeration but are certainly not confined to it: There has always been to-ing and fro-ing between town and country and often further afield (e.g. the nineteenth-century army and colonies). The (possibly apocryphal) Lyonnais novelist said only to have left the Croix Rousse once, to be shown the airport, is, perhaps always was, atypical of the urban dweller. Lodge is aware of this, since he declines to take the story beyond 1950 on the grounds that “subsequent developments in communication and inter-continental migration have transformed Paris in ways that transcend those of the industrial period” (193). But the methodological problem is not confined to a post-industrial, postmodern Paris, even if it may have been less acute in earlier epochs.

Notwithstanding such criticisms, this is an excellent, meticulously documented urban linguistic history, one of the best of its kind. Its limitations largely come with the territory (e.g. the paucity of data), though perhaps Lodge might have thrown his theoretical net wider and been a little less cautious. He should be encouraged to take the story past 1950, though the problem of lack of data is then replaced by the difficulty of managing its abundance and setting boundaries. In many respects the book is a model for others, and similar histories of other European capital and imperial cities – London, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Moscow – would add considerably to our comparative understanding of the phenomena Lodge discusses.