History of French

Southern France was also home to a number of other remnant linguistic and ethnic groups including Iberians along the eastern part of the Pyrenees and western Mediterranean coast, the remnant Ligures on the eastern Mediterranean coast and in the alpine areas, Greek colonials in places such as Marseille and Antibes,[1] and Vascones and Aquitani (Proto-Basques) in much of the southwest.

[5] The Celtic population of Gaul had spoken Gaulish, which is moderately well attested and appears to have wide dialectal variation including one distinctive variety, Lepontic.

The French language evolved from Vulgar Latin (a Latinised popular Italic dialect called sermo vulgaris), but it was influenced by Gaulish.

[6][7] Examples include sandhi phenomena (liaison, resyllabification, lenition), the loss of unstressed syllables and the vowel system (such as raising /u/, /o/ → /y/, /u/, fronting stressed /a/ → /e/, /ɔ/ → /ø/ or /œ/).

[8][9] Syntactic oddities attributable to Gaulish include the intensive prefix ro- ~ re- (cited in the Vienna glossary, 5th century)[10] (cf.

luire "to glimmer" vs. reluire "to shine"; related to Irish ro- and Welsh rhy- "very"), emphatic structures, prepositional periphrastic phrases to render verbal aspect and the semantic development of oui "yes", aveugle "blind".

Some sound changes are attested: /ps/ → /xs/ and /pt/ → /xt/ appears in a pottery inscription from la Graufesenque (1st century) in which the word paraxsidi is written for paropsides.

[11] Similarly, the development -cs- → /xs/ → /is/ and -ct- → /xt/ → /it/, the latter being common to much of Western Romance languages, also appears in inscriptions: Divicta ~ Divixta, Rectugenus ~ Rextugenus ~ Reitugenus, and is present in Welsh, e.g. *seχtan → saith "seven", *eχtamos → eithaf "extreme".

For Romance, compare: Both changes sometimes had a cumulative effect in French: Latin capsa → *kaχsa → caisse (vs. Italian cassa, Spanish caja) or captīvus → *kaχtivus → Occitan caitiu, OFr chaitif[12] (mod.

The eventual spread of Latin can be attributed to social factors in the Late Empire such as the movement from urban-focused power to village-centred economies and legal serfdom.

In the 3rd century, Western Europe started to be invaded by Germanic tribes from the north and the east, and some of the groups settled in Gaul.

In the history of the French language, the most important groups are the Franks in much of northern France, the Alemanni in the modern German/French border area (Alsace), the Burgundians in the Rhône (and the Saone) Valley, the Suebi in the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia and Northern Portugal, the Vandals in Southern Andalusia, and the Visigoths in much of southern France as well as Spain.

The Frankish language had a profound influence on the Latin spoken in their respective regions by altering both the pronunciation (especially the vowel system phonemes: e, eu, u, short o) and the syntax.

Frankish shaped the popular Latin spoken there and gave it a very distinctive character compared to the other future Romance languages.

Urban T. Holmes Jr. estimated that German was spoken as a second language by public officials in western Austrasia and Neustria as late as the 850s and that it had completely disappeared as a spoken language from those regions only in the 10th century,[24] but some traces of Germanic elements still survive, especially in dialectal French (Poitevin, Norman, Burgundian, Walloon, Picard etc.).

Most of the words are about the sea and seafaring: abraquer, alque, bagage, bitte, cingler, équiper (to equip), flotte, fringale, girouette, guichet, hauban, houle, hune, mare, marsouin, mouette, quille, raz, siller, touer, traquer, turbot, vague, varangue, varech.

Others pertain to farming and daily life: accroupir, amadouer, bidon, bigot, brayer, brette, cottage, coterie, crochet, duvet, embraser, fi, flâner, guichet, haras, harfang, harnais, houspiller, marmonner, mièvre, nabot, nique, quenotte, raccrocher, ricaner, rincer, rogue.

Likewise, most words borrowed from Dutch deal with trade or are nautical in nature: affaler, amarrer, anspect, bar (sea-bass), bastringuer, bière (beer), blouse (bump), botte, bouée, bouffer, boulevard, bouquin, cague, cahute, caqueter, choquer, diguer, drôle, dune, équiper (to set sail), frelater, fret, grouiller, hareng, hère, lamaneur, lège, manne, mannequin, maquiller, matelot, méringue, moquer, plaque, sénau, tribord, vacarme, as are words from Low German: bivouac, bouder, homard, vogue, yole, and English of this period: arlequin (from Italian arlecchino < Norman hellequin < OE *Herla cyning), bateau, bébé, bol (sense 2 ≠ bol < Lt. bolus), bouline, bousin, cambuse, cliver, chiffe/chiffon, drague, drain, est, groom, héler, lac, merlin, mouette, nord, ouest, potasse, rade, rhum, sonde, sud, turf, yacht.

The Gallo-Romance group in the north of France, the langue d'oïl like Picard, Walloon and Francien, were influenced by the Germanic languages spoken by the Frankish invaders.

From the 4th to the 7th centuries, Brythonic-speaking peoples from Cornwall, Devon and Wales travelled across the English Channel for reasons of trade and of flight from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of England.

Proto-Basque influenced the emerging Latin-based language spoken in the area between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, which eventually resulted in the dialect of Occitan called Gascon.

[28] By the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 King Francis I made French the official language of administration and court proceedings in France, which ousted Latin, which had been used earlier.

Many of the 700 words[29] of Modern French that originate from Italian were introduced in this period, including several denoting artistic concepts (scenario, piano), luxury items and food.

"[31] Hobsbawm highlighted the role of conscription, invented by Napoleon, and of the 1880s public instruction laws, which allowed to mix the various groups of France into a nationalist mold, which created the French citizen and his consciousness of membership to a common nation, and the various "patois" were progressively eradicated.

There is some debate in today's France about the preservation of the French language and the influence of English (see Franglais), especially with regard to international business, the sciences and popular culture.

A small but increasing number of large multinational firms headquartered in France use English as their working language even in their French operations.

[33] French remains the second most-studied foreign language in the world, after English,[34] and is a lingua franca in some regions, notably in Africa.

[36] French has radically transformative sound changes, especially compared to other Romance languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian: The Vulgar Latin[a] underlying French and most other Romance languages had seven vowels in stressed syllables (/a ɛ e i ɔ o u/, which are similar to the vowels of American English pat/pot pet pate peat caught coat coot respectively), and five in unstressed syllables (/a e i o u/).

Perhaps the most salient characteristic of French vowel history is the development of a strong stress accent, which is usually ascribed to the influence of the Germanic languages.

This table shows the outcomes: As described above, Late Vulgar Latin of the French area had an extensive series of palatalized consonants that developed from numerous sources.