The quill and languages: Thoughts on the choice of a language for writing during the early modern era.

In the 16(th) and 17(th) centuries, the act of writing involved a choice that, we assume, writers had thought out. This choice was conditioned by the hierarchy of a set of possible languages available in a given space and at a given time. Though still prestigious, Latin had to compete with vernaculars, the nascent forms of standard languages. Alongside a written vulgar Latin, there were, nearly everywhere in Europe, one or more languages that, in theory, could be but were not (or seldom) chosen. Writing in a language with wide circulation, such as French, Tuscan or High German, did not have the same significance as in Poitevin, Piedmontese or Low German. The selection of a ''major'' language corresponded to criteria that were social (mobility), political (relations with royal power) or economic (the book market). An elite that dominated a certain form of language recognized itself therein. Selecting a ''little'' language without literary or social prestige had a refusal of the dominant sociolinguistic paradigm as it grounds. These writers were motivated very seldom by an attraction for a ''people'' and never by a political cause. In the small room left for ''little'' languages, certain writers discovered an ethical (to save the language) or aesthetic (freedom of expression outside dominant norms) dimension.