AHC: Keep Law French alive

Law French was an archaic form of Old French/Anglo-Norman used in English courts from around the 11th century (in the Norman Conquest) until the 17th century, albeit in an extremely simple, debased form. Can the tide of decline and obsolescence be halted? Is it possible to keep an archaic language alive in the courts, after it's long since gone the way of the dinosaur beyond them?

None of the policies that eroded it over the generations really look like a decisive deathblow except maybe Cromwell cleaning house of legalistic rituals, but by 1650 Law French was doomed anyway, so there's less of a clear POD earlier on that would lead to the language sticking around. Maybe the English continuing to have a pied-à-terre in France, but one that's still small enough that it doesn't demographically overwhelm England and turn it into a barren colonial outpost of a Norman/Angevin/Aquitainian kingdom, might keep French (and thus Law French) relevant in England beyond the 14th-15th centuries? Or is the best-case scenario for the French in the English courts of law to merely merge back into a continental French standard?
 
Bumping this for the day crowd. Any other alt-linguistics fans have ideas, or is this too tough to pull off feasibly?
 
England continuing to hold Normandy would help.

I was going to suggest the holding of Aquitaine might help - but that was Occitan territory, so Norman French would be even further weakened, not strengthened.

So. Plantagenets continuing on, and continuing to hold the Channel coast (Normandy, possibly Picardy, possibly Brittany) is probably your best bet.

Without the continental foothold, French (of any sort) became less and less relevant, and less prestigious. With it, it could stay, at least in some usages (like law).

What you might then see would be a merger of Norman and Anglo-Norman, diverging from Parisian French (Castel instead of Château, etc., etc.)
 
So. Plantagenets continuing on, and continuing to hold the Channel coast (Normandy, possibly Picardy, possibly Brittany) is probably your best bet.

Without the continental foothold, French (of any sort) became less and less relevant, and less prestigious. With it, it could stay, at least in some usages (like law).

I suspect that this would be more a stay of execution for Law French than a guarantee of survival, because as more non-elite people begin to use the courts, there would still be a movement for legal proceedings to be conducted in the vernacular. Outside the territories where Norman French is actually spoken on a daily basis, Law French would decline for the same reason Latin did IOTL - the law is a conservative profession and lawyers have always preferred to mystify it, but they wouldn't be able to do so forever in the face of pressure from a growing English-speaking middle class.

Also, if the English kingdom holds onto Normandy, the courts there would use actual Norman French rather than the debased code-switching which became Law French, so Law French as we know it might never arise at all. There might instead be a situation in which the lower courts in each of the English domains used the local vernacular while the appellate courts were bilingual. Of course, if English spreads to Normandy, then something similar to Law French might arise as a demotic creole, and if it lasts (say, if Normandy ends up with a quasi-separate status like the Channel Islands IOTL), then it may persist as a legal language. I believe the Channel Islands IOTL do still use a version of French for judicial purposes.
 
If England loses Normandy, but then subsequently a duke of Normandy go on to inherit England later on, perhaps in 1350, this could lead to the persistence of a sort of koiné dialect of the eroding Anglo-Norman language of the English court, which gets "reinfused" with French speakers. Maybe there's a long period of turmoil where England and France remain disunited for long periods of time, and another say, hundred years of English royalty having deep links with the royalty of France, enough to make it so that English nobility are inheriting lands in France and vice versa, maybe this Anglo-Norman koiné sticks around, and because it remains the first language of the nobility, it continues to be used into the courts.

If England and Normandy do manage to stick together, a Norman French infused with English loanwords (ironically, many of which will be from Norman in the first place) might look a lot like this Law French, though it does remove a lot of the "fun" of the challenge. I think to keep the use of an archaic language in the courts but not elsewhere requires for the courts to remain essentially inaccessible for non-nobility, so stifling the end of feudalism seems like one of the few ways even extending the lifeline for Law French could actually lead to it being still used a few hundred years later.
 
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