We tried to show in Chapter 4 how a specific français de Paris may have developed initially through a process of koinéisation in the social and linguistic melting-pot of the medieval city. In this chapter we will see what information may be gleaned from contemporary written documents. If we follow the quantitative methodology pioneered by A. Dees, we might be able to discern in the writing system used in medieval Parisian documents distant traces of the dialect-mixing and variation characteristic of medieval Parisian speech. We will conclude the chapter with general remarks on the city's sociolinguistic structure at the end of the thirteenth century.

Although Paris was not a port-city with colonies of speakers drawn from widely scattered areas of the known world, in the thirteenth century it became a dialect melting-pot, and has continued to be one ever since. It attracted relatively large numbers of English-speakers, Flemish-speakers, Italian-speakers, Latin-speakers (see Beaulieux 1927: 112–26), but the most important element in the formation of its patterns of speech was the constant flow, in and out of the city, of speakers of other north Gallo-Romance dialects like Picard, Champenois and Norman, and, of course, HDP. It has been observed that in bourgeoning cities in the modern world, high levels of in-migration and population-mixing induce a corresponding level of dialect-mixing, which may lead eventually to koinéisation (see Manessy 1994: 23).