Abstract
A major issue in the history of the French language that has remained open until today concerns the nature of the French used by the royal institutions in Paris, especially the Royal Chancery, which is the most important. The completion of the full edition of 120 French documents that we identified as coming from the Parisian Royal Chancery enables us, for the first time, to analyze more closely the question posed in the title of this article – How did the Royal French Chancery write in the 13th century ? – on an empirical rather than a speculative basis. On a macro-linguistic level, it appears that in the 13th century, the Royal Chancellery was far from being a « monolingual » institution, even regarding the use of the vernacular language : next to documents written in a decidedly « central » French, in some particular situations also Picard is used. On a micro-linguistic level, it results that the internal variation of the « central » French used by the Royal Chancery constantly decreases during the 13th century, but that even at the end of this period, some residual variation remains clearly observable.