Whereas dialectologists and regional language militants favour the specificities of the dialects, describing 'in-situation' regional Oïl speaking, which raises interesting theoretical questions of actuality, remains an insufficiently explored domain in France. This paper shows some examples of literary texts of the Oïl regional varieties.Contrarily to the dominant French language tradition, it is demonstrated the 'French' itself (in the central Oïl area) presents diatopic variations: in contrario, in the other Oïl regions, we encounter not French but different varieties: wallon, picard, normand, gallo, poitevin-saintongeais, etc. There, the truly linguistic features cannot be dissociated from symbolic identity, and are a focus for normative constructions. The measure of their existence cannot be reduced to simple statistics (totally unreliable), but it is clear that these varieties have not (not yet ?) disappeared.Correctly apprehending these realities is important for both sociolinguistics and democracy.