earlier period, which had included many features shared throughout the empire, gave way
to divergence and to the formation of the Romance tongues. The language spoken in Gaul
during this period, called Gallo-Roman, gradually underwent considerable dialectal
differentiation. By the mid-9th century, two main dialect groups could be found in Gaul:
in an area roughly south of the Loire River were the dialects of the Langue d’oc, now
called Provençal or Occitan; north of there were the dialects of the Langue d’oïl, the
ancestor of modern French.
Stages in the development of the language from colloquial Latin through Middle
French are:
Late (or “Vulgar”) Latin: 2nd century B.C. to 5th century A.D.
Gallo-Roman: end of 5th to mid-9th century
Early Old French: mid-9th to end of 11th century
Old French: 12th and 13th centuries
Middle French: 14th and 15th centuriesBy the Carolingian Renaissance (ca. 800), French and Latin were separate languages,
though conscious reform rather than natural linguistic evolution may have shaped the
Latin used at the time. In 813, the Council of Tours recommended that priests explain the
word of God in the language of the people, that is, in the rusticam Romanam linguam. In
842, Charlemagne’s feuding grandsons paved the way for the division of his land by
swearing the Oaths of Strasbourg. The oaths were recorded by another family member,
the chronicler Nithard, and have subsequently become the event scholars cite to mark the
beginning of the Early Old French period.
A Latin of record, religion, and learning persisted. In the spirit of the Council of
Tours, however, inspirational literature began to appear in the vernacular. The earliest
surviving example of a saint’s life, the Séquence de sainte Eulalie, dates from the 9th
century.
In England, for more than two centuries after the Norman Conquest of 1066, French
was the language spoken by the group of people surrounding the ruler. At first, their
dialect must have reflected Norman usage, but nobles arriving later came from other parts
of France. As in France itself, the use of French in imaginative works preceded by far its
appearance in official documents, for which Latin was preferred. Although many words
of French origin entered English, there is little evidence that French became the language
of the people. English borrowings into French are rare before the 17th century.
Gallo-Roman and Early Old French. Of the numerous and complex phonological
changes that occurred during the early centuries, perhaps the most sweeping were those
caused by one or more of the following speech habits: word stress, palatalization, and,
beginning in the Early Old French period, vowel nasalization. Along with a tendency to
vocalize consonants or to eliminate them without trace, these forces, or their greater
impact in Gaul than elsewhere, gave to Old French its distinctive character. They are
responsible for the creation of new diphthongs and consonants, as well as for a dramatic
loss of syllables. The following discussion offers examples of those changes. (Phonetic
symbols employed are those of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Upper-case letters
are used for Latin forms. An asterisk denotes an unattested form. Bracketing indicates
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 708