Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "to speak" or "speech." In medieval English legal usage, *parler* denoted the act of oral pleading or formal speaking before a court, as well as the speaker himself. The term is a direct borrowing from Old French and underlies a cluster of legal vocabulary related to oral advocacy, negotiation, and formal legal address — including *parley*, *parlement*, and the English *parlour* (a room set aside for speaking or conference).
As a functional legal term, *parler* appears in early common law sources to describe the oral dimension of pleading at a time when proceedings were conducted in Law French. It is less a term of art with precise doctrinal content than a building block of legal vocabulary, significant for what it generated rather than what it independently defined.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Parler* is a French verb meaning "to speak." In English, it has no standard standalone usage except in borrowed phrases or proper nouns.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's does not carry *parler* as an English entry. The cognate *parlor* (or *parlour*) is defined as a room for conversation or reception, derived from the same French root.
The gap here is one of register rather than meaning reversal. In common usage, the root survives only in architectural vocabulary (*parlor*, *parlour*) — a room for speaking — while the legal usage preserved the verbal and procedural sense: the act of speaking formally before a tribunal, and the person doing so. A researcher encountering *parler* in a legal manuscript is not reading about a room but about the oral act of pleading itself.
Common Confusion
*Parler* is occasionally confused with *parole* (also from the same French root, meaning "word" or "spoken word"), which had distinct legal meaning in early common law as an oral, as opposed to written, undertaking. The two terms share etymology but diverged in application: *parler* referred to the act of speaking in pleading; *parole* designated the legal weight or character of spoken (rather than sealed) obligations. See PAROLE.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal manuscripts, Year Books, or Law French pleading records will encounter *parler* as part of the procedural vocabulary of oral advocacy. Its importance is primarily lexical rather than doctrinal: understanding it unlocks related terms that do carry technical legal weight.
Two traps arise in historical sources. First, the term appears inconsistently transcribed — sometimes rendered *parler*, sometimes *parler*, sometimes collapsed into cognates like *parlance* or *parlour* — making keyword searches unreliable across early printed sources. Second, Burrill's entry is compressed and does not fully separate the verbal sense (to speak) from the nominal sense (a speaker), nor does it connect the term explicitly to its procedural context in oral pleading. Researchers should treat Burrill as a pointer, not a complete account.
The Law Mind corpus connection runs through oral pleading, Law French procedural vocabulary, and the evolution from oral to written practice in English courts. *Parler* sits at the origin of that transition. Terms derived from the same root — including *parliament* (the speaking body), *parley* (a conference, especially in the law of war), and *parlour* (the speaking room in ecclesiastical and monastic contexts, sometimes relevant in ecclesiastical law) — all reward attention in adjacent corpus searches.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary historical entry: "L. Fr. To speak. Parlance; speech. L. Fr. Dict. Parlour; Britt. c. 50. a speaker. Kelham." The entry is characteristically terse. Burrill draws on Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* (1779), which is the standard reference for Law French vocabulary of this kind, and on Britton (c. 1290), one of the early Anglo-Norman legal treatises.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind shelf — Bouvier, Black, or Tomlin — carry independent entries for *parler*, reflecting its status as a root vocabulary item rather than a term of operative legal doctrine. Its significance was absorbed into its derivatives before English-language legal dictionaries became systematic.
What historical sources collectively miss is the procedural richness of the oral pleading context. *Parler* in Year Book usage implies a moment of formal oral exchange before a judge — a distinct legal event with its own conventions — not merely conversation. That procedural specificity is not recoverable from dictionary entries alone and requires reference to Year Book scholarship directly.
Jurisdictional Note
*Parler* as a term of art belongs exclusively to the historical English common law tradition and the Law French pleading system. It has no operative presence in modern American, English, or Commonwealth law. Researchers encountering it will be working in pre-modern sources, almost certainly pre-1650.