On the formation of the French written literary language

The paper investigates the language of Old French business writing of the 13th centu-ry. Old French charters are analyzed from the standpoint of functional stylistics as well as the theory of genesis of a written literary language so as to specify their linguistic peculiarities and their contribution to the standardization and unification which took place in the French lan-guage during its prenational period. Research into the language and composition of the 13th century charters has revealed that written business French of the prenational period is characterized by a formulaic style and has its own established traditions both in the composition and language. It has also been stat-ed that verb tense forms in the charters are highly standardized and to some extent contrast with the variability of their meaning and usage in Old French texts of all other genres. Fur-ther, it has been established that the charters syntactic patterns are much more diverse than those that can be found in any other writing of the period. The charters’ lexical study has shown that their vocabulary is quite extensive. This refutes the wide-spread opinion in Ro-mance philology that business texts use a restricted vocabulary. Text analysis in its turn has shown that distinctive features of business style are already present in the business texts of the Old French period. Thus, the results of the study revealed the influence of the Old French business language on standardization of written French as early as in its pre-national period.