What are, today, the main objectives and innovative methods in the history of the French language? How to conceive the relations between diachronic linguistics, history of the language and historical sociolinguistics? To what extent is it appropriate to question the traditional opposition between factors of linguistic change internal and external to language? Should one be both historian and linguist to make history of the language? It is to these questions that the volume tries to answer, by highlighting, on the one hand, the methodological innovations related to corpus linguistics, by insisting, on the other hand, on the role of certain societal phenomena, of which relevance for linguistic evolution seems likely.--Amazon.prime