Old French
Old French was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th and mid-14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a group of Romance dialects, mutually intelligible yet diverse. These dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl, contrasting with the langues Occitan language, the emerging Occitano-Romance languages of Occitania, now Southern France.
The mid-14th century witnessed the emergence of Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance in the Île-de-France region; this dialect was a predecessor to Modern French. Other dialects of Old French evolved themselves into modern forms, each with its linguistic features and history.
The region where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the northern half of the Kingdom of France and its vassals, and the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine to the east, but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England and the Crusader states as the language of a feudal elite and commerce.
Areal and dialectal divisions
The area of Old French in contemporary terms corresponded to the northern parts of the Kingdom of France, Upper Burgundy and the Duchy of Lorraine. The Norman dialect was also spread to England and Ireland, and during the Crusades, Old French was also spoken in the Kingdom of Sicily, and in the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Levant.As part of the emerging Gallo-Romance dialect continuum, the langues d'oïl were contrasted with the langues d'oc, at the time also called "Provençal", adjacent to the Old French area in the southwest, and with the Gallo-Italic group to the southeast. The Franco-Provençal group developed in Upper Burgundy, sharing features with both French and Provençal; it may have begun to diverge from the langue d'oïl as early as the late 8th century and is attested as a distinct Gallo-Romance variety by the 12th century.
Dialects or variants of Old French include:
- Burgundian in Burgundy, then an independent duchy whose capital was at Dijon;
- Picard of Picardy and Romance Flanders, with Lille, Amiens and Arras as some of the more prominent cities. It was said that the Picard language began at the east door of Notre-Dame de Paris, so far-reaching was its influence. It would also spread northwards in the area of Boulogne-sur-Mer that had a strong presence of Old Dutch and Middle Dutch;
- Old Norman, in Normandy, whose principal cities were Caen and Rouen. The Norman Conquest of England brought many Norman-speaking aristocrats into Britain. Most of the older Norman words in English reflect its influence, which became a conduit for the introduction into the Anglo-Norman realm, as did Anglo-Norman control of Anjou and Gascony and other continental possessions. Anglo-Norman was a language that reflected a shared culture on both sides of the English Channel. Ultimately, the language declined and fell, becoming Law French, a jargon spoken by lawyers that was used in English law until the reign of Charles II of England; however, Norman varieties still survive in Normandy and the Channel Islands as regional languages: Jèrriais, Guernésiais, Sercquiais, and Auregnais
- Walloon, around Namur, now in Wallonia, Belgium;
- Gallo of the Duchy of Brittany;
- Lorrain of the Duchy of Lorraine.
History
Evolution and separation from Vulgar Latin
Beginning with Plautus' time, one can see phonological changes between Classical Latin and what is called Vulgar Latin, the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire. Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in phonology and morphology as well as exhibiting lexical differences; however, they were mutually intelligible until the 7th century when Classical Latin "died" as a daily spoken language, and had to be learned as a second language. Vulgar Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages, including Old French.By the late 8th century, when the Carolingian Renaissance began, native speakers of Romance idioms continued to use Romance orthoepy rules while speaking and reading Latin. When the most prominent scholar of Western Europe at the time, English deacon Alcuin, was tasked by Charlemagne with improving the standards of Latin writing in France, not being a native Romance speaker himself, he prescribed a pronunciation based on a fairly literal interpretation of Latin spelling. For example, in a radical break from the traditional system, a word such as now had to be read aloud precisely as it was spelled rather than .
Such a radical change had the effect of rendering Latin sermons completely unintelligible to the general Romance-speaking public, which prompted officials a few years later, at the Third Council of Tours, to instruct priests to read sermons aloud in the old way, in rusticam romanam linguam or 'plain Roman speech'.
As there was now no unambiguous way to indicate whether a given text was to be read aloud as Latin or Romance, various attempts were made in France to devise a new orthography for the latter; among the earliest examples are parts of the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.
Non-Latin influences
Gaulish
Some Gaulish words influenced Vulgar Latin and, through this, other Romance languages. For example, classical Latin wikt:equus was uniformly replaced in Vulgar Latin by wikt:caballus 'nag, work horse', derived from Gaulish caballos, yielding wikt:cheval, Occitan caval, Catalan wikt:cavall, Spanish wikt:caballo, Portuguese wikt:cavalo, Italian wikt:cavallo, Romanian wikt:cal, and, by extension, English cavalry and chivalry.An estimated 200 words of Gaulish etymology survive in Modern French, for example
wikt:chêne and wikt:charrue.
Within historical phonology and studies of language contact, various phonological changes have been posited as caused by a Gaulish substrate, although there is some debate. One of these is considered certain, because this fact is clearly attested in the Gaulish-language epigraphy on the pottery found at la Graufesenque.
There, the Greek word appears as paraxsid-i. The consonant clusters /ps/ and /pt/ shifted to /xs/ and /xt/, e.g. capsa > *kaxsa > caisse
or captīvus > *kaxtivus > chaitif.
This phonetic evolution is common in its later stages with the shift of the Latin cluster /kt/ in Old French.
This means that both /pt/ and /kt/ must have first merged into /kt/ in the history of Old French, after which this /kt/ shifted to /xt/. In parallel, /ps/ and /ks/ merged into /ks/ before shifting to /xs/, apparently under Gaulish influence.
The Celtic Gaulish language is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France, despite considerable cultural Romanization.
Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French, with effects including loanwords and calques
, sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence,
and influences in conjugation and word order.
A computational study from 2003 suggests that early gender shifts may have been motivated by the gender of the corresponding word in Gaulish.
Frankish
The pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gaul in late antiquity were modified by the Old Frankish language, spoken by the Franks who settled in Gaul from the 5th century and conquered the future Old French-speaking area by the 530s. The word wikt:français itself is derived from the Late Latin name for the Franks.The Old Frankish language had a definitive influence on the development of Old French, which partly explains why the earliest attested Old French documents are older than the earliest attestations in other Romance languages. It is the result of an earlier gap created between Classical Latin and its evolved forms, which slowly reduced and eventually severed the mutual intelligibility between the two.
The Old Low Franconian influence is also believed to be responsible for the differences between the langue d'oïl and the
langue d'oc, being that various parts of Northern France remained bilingual between Latin and Germanic for some time, and these areas correspond precisely to where the first documents in Old French were written.
This Germanic language shaped the popular Latin spoken here and gave it a very distinctive identity compared to the other future Romance languages. The first noticeable influence is the substitution of the Latin melodic accent with a Germanic stress and its result was diphthongization, differentiation between long and short vowels, the fall of the unaccented syllable and of the final vowels:
- decimus, -a > disme > French dîme
- dignitate > deintié
- catena > chaeine
- altu > halt
- vespa > wespe, guespe, French guêpe, Picard wèpe, Walloon wèsse, all
- viscus > French gui
- vulpiculu > golpilz, Picard woupil
One example of a Latin word influencing an loan is framboise, from frambeise, from brāmbesi blended with fraga or fraie, which explains the replacement > and in turn the final -se of framboise added to fraie to make freise, modern fraise.
Mildred Pope estimated that perhaps still 15% of the vocabulary of Modern French derives from Germanic sources. This proportion was larger in Old French, because Middle French borrowed heavily from Latin and Italian.