Frankish language
Frankish, also known as Old Franconian or Old Frankish, was a West Germanic language spoken by the Franks from the 5th to 10th centuries.
Franks under King Chlodio settled in Roman Gaul in the 5th century. One of his successors, Clovis I, took over the Roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis. Outnumbered by the local populace, the ruling Franks there adapted to its language which was a Proto-Romance dialect. However, many modern French words and place names are still of Frankish origin.
Between the 5th and 10th centuries, Frankish spoken in Northeastern France, present-day Belgium, and the Netherlands is subsequently referred to as Old Dutch, whereas the Frankish varieties spoken in the Rhineland were heavily influenced by Elbe Germanic dialects and the Second Germanic consonant shift and formed part of the modern Central Franconian and Rhine Franconian dialects of German and Luxembourgish.
The Old Frankish language is poorly attested and mostly reconstructed from Frankish loanwords in Old French, and inherited words in Old Dutch, as recorded from the 6th to 12th centuries. A notable exception is the runic Bergakker inscription, which may represent a primary record of 5th-century Frankish, though it is debated whether the inscription is written in Frankish or Old Dutch.
Nomenclature
and German studies have their origins in the first half of the 19th century when Romanticism and Romantic thought heavily influenced the lexicon of the linguists and philologists of the time, including pivotal figures such as the Brothers Grimm. As a result, many contemporary linguists tried to incorporate their findings in an already existing historical framework of "stem duchies" and Altstämme resulting in a taxonomy which spoke of "Bavarian", "Saxon", "Frisian", "Thuringian", "Swabian" and "Frankish" dialects. While this nomenclature became generally accepted in traditional Germanic philology, it has also been described as "inherently inaccurate" as these ancient ethnic boundaries bore little or limited resemblance to the actual or historical linguistic situation of the Germanic languages. Among other problems, this traditional classification of the continental West Germanic dialects can suggest stronger ties between dialects than is linguistically warranted. The Franconian group is a well known example of this, with East Franconian being much more closely related to Bavarian dialects than it is to Dutch, which is traditionally placed in the Low Franconian sub-grouping and with which it was thought to have had a common, tribal origin.In a modern linguistic context, the language of the early Franks is variously called "Old Frankish" or "Old Franconian" and refers to the language of the Franks prior to the advent of the High German consonant shift, which took place between 600 and 700 AD. After this consonant shift the Frankish dialect diverges, with the dialects which would become modern Low Franconian not undergoing the consonantal shift, while all others did so to varying degrees. As a result, the distinction between Old Dutch and Old Frankish is largely negligible, with Old Dutch being the term used to differentiate between the affected and non-affected variants following the aforementioned Second Germanic consonant shift.
History
Origins
The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. Their exact relation is difficult to determine, and they remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, rendering some individual varieties difficult to classify.The language spoken by the Franks was part of the West Germanic language group, which had features from Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture. The West Germanic group is characterized by a number of phonological and morphological innovations not found in North and East Germanic. The West Germanic varieties of the time are generally split into three dialect groups: Ingvaeonic, Istvaeonic and Irminonic. While each had its own distinct characteristics, there certainly must have still been a high degree of mutual intelligibility between these dialects. In fact, it is unclear whether the West Germanic continuum of this time period, or indeed Franconian itself, should still be considered a single language or if it should be considered a collection of similar dialects.
In any case, it appears that the Frankish tribes, or the later Franks, fit primarily into the Istvaeonic dialect group, with certain Ingvaeonic influences towards the northwest, and more Irminonic influences towards the southeast.
Salian and Ripuarian Franks (3rd–5th centuries)
The scholarly consensus concerning the Migration Period is that the Frankish identity emerged during the first half of the 3rd century out of various earlier, smaller Germanic groups, including the Salii, Sicambri, Chamavi, Bructeri, Chatti, Chattuarii, Ampsivarii, Tencteri, Ubii, Batavi, and Tungri. It is speculated that these tribes originally spoke a range of related Istvaeonic dialects in the West Germanic branch of Proto-Germanic. Sometime in the 4th or 5th centuries, it becomes appropriate to speak of Old Franconian rather than an Istvaeonic dialect of Proto-Germanic.Very little is known about what the language was like during this period. One older runic sentence is on the sword scabbard of Bergakker which is either a direct attestation of the Old Franconian language or the earliest attestation of Old Low Franconian language. Another early sentence from the early 6th century AD is found in the Lex Salica. This phrase was used to free a serf:
These are the earliest sentences yet found of Old Franconian.
During this early period, the Franks were divided politically and geographically into two groups: the Salian Franks and the Ripuarian Franks. The language spoken by the Salian Franks during this period is sometimes referred to as early "Old Low Franconian", and consisted of two groups: "Old West Low Franconian" and "Old East Low Franconian". The language spoken by the Ripuarian Franks are referred to just as Old Franconian dialects.
However, as already stated above, it may be more accurate to think of these dialects not as early Old Franconian but as Istvaeonic dialects in the West Germanic branch of Proto-Germanic.
Frankish Empire (5th–10th centuries)
At around the 5th century, the Franks probably spoke a range of related dialects and languages rather than a single uniform dialect or language. The language of both government and the Church was Latin.Area
Austrasia
During the expansion into France and Germany, many Frankish people remained in the original core Frankish territories in the north. The Franks united as a single group under Salian Frank leadership around 500 AD. Politically, the Ripuarian Franks existed as a separate group only until about 500 AD, after which they were subsumed into the Salian Franks. The Franks were united, but the various Frankish groups must have continued to live in the same areas that they had lived in before unification, and to speak the same dialects as before.There must have been a close relationship between the various Franconian dialects. There was also a close relationship between Old Low Franconian and its neighboring Old Saxon and Old Frisian languages and dialects to the north and northeast, as well as the related Old English dialects spoken in southern and eastern Britain.
A widening cultural divide grew between the Franks remaining in the north and the rulers far to the south. Franks continued to reside in their original territories and to speak their original dialects and languages. It is not known what they called their language, but it is possible that they always called it "Diets" or something similar. The word Diets is cognate with the Old English word þēodisc which, likewise, meant both nation and speech.
Philologists think of Old Dutch and Old West Low Franconian as being the same language. However, sometimes reference is made to a transition from the language spoken by the Salian Franks to Old Dutch. The language spoken by the Salian Franks must have developed significantly during the seven centuries from 200 to 900 AD. At some point, the language spoken by the Franks must have become identifiably Dutch. Because Franconian texts are almost non-existent and Old Dutch texts scarce and fragmentary, it is difficult to determine when such a transition occurred, but it is thought to have happened by the end of the 9th century and perhaps earlier. By 900 AD the language spoken was recognizably an early form of Dutch, but that might also have been the case earlier. Old Dutch made the transition to Middle Dutch around 1150. A Dutch-French language boundary came into existence.
Gaul
The Franks expanded south into Gaul as the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century. Although the Franks would eventually conquer almost all of Gaul, speakers of Old Franconian expanded only into northern Gaul in numbers sufficient to have a linguistic effect. For several centuries, northern Gaul was a bilingual territory. The language used in writing, in government and by the Church was Latin. Eventually, the Franks who had settled more to the south of this area in northern Gaul started adopting the common Latin of the local population. This Colloquial Latin language acquired the name of the people who came to speak it ; north of the French-Dutch language boundary, the language was no longer referred to as "Frankish" but rather came to be referred to as "Diets", i.e. the "people's language". Urban T. Holmes has proposed that a Germanic language continued to be spoken as a second tongue by public officials in western Austrasia and Neustria as late as the 850s, and that it completely disappeared as a spoken language from these regions only during the 10th century.German Franconia
The Franks also expanded their rule southeast into parts of Germany. Their language had some influence on local dialects, especially for terms relating to warfare.However, since the language of both the administration and the Church was Latin, this unification did not lead to the development of a supra-regional variety of Franconian nor a standardized German language. At the same time that the Franks were expanding southeast into what is now southern Germany, there were linguistic changes taking place in the region. The High German consonant shift was a phonological development that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost complete before the earliest written records in the High German language were made in the 9th century. The resulting language, Old High German, can be neatly contrasted with Low Franconian, which for the most part did not experience the shift.