In this article we shall be mainly concerned with French, a language which has often interfered with Shakespeare's English. In quite a few cases the balance of the basic English text is disturbed by the more or less obvious intrusion of different Romance elements. This may be described as the bilingual situation in the source language, the stylistic ‘diglossia’. 

We shall now begin with humour because, as is well-known, Shakespeare not infrequently makes fun of medieval and Renaissance French in his characters' speech-portrayals, as for instance, in the much-quoted passage from As You Like It :

TOUCHSTONE. ... Therefore, you clown, abandon — which is in the vulgar leave - the society — which in the boorish is company — of this female — which in the common is woman — which together is: abandon the society of this female; or, clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest ...   (V. 1. 44-50)

In Shakespeare's time the mutual relationship between Anglo-Saxon and French was still far from easy. Obviously, as seen from the above passage, the words "society", "female", "perish", which had come from Latin by way of French, and the French word "abandon" were apprehended as something that disturbed the balance of the initial semiological system. Being Late Middle English — Early Modern English borrowings the words still retained their ‘foreignness’, in contrast with Romance words borrowed in the Norman period. The latter were fully assimilated by the end of the XIV century, so that by Shakespeare's time people did not apprehend words like "company" as foreign, while the newly borrowed word "society" would be regarded by them as an ‘alien’ intruder.

That was how Shakespeare created this particular kind of humorous effect — by contrasting the non-assimilated latinical words with their Anglo-Saxon counterparts or with completely assimilated Romance words: none of those effects were likely to be lost on the audience.