Frankish language

One of his successors, named Clovis I, would take over the roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis (in modern day France).

Outnumbered by the local populace, the ruling Franks there would adapt to its language which was a Proto-Romance dialect.

As a result, many contemporary linguists tried to incorporate their findings in an already existing historical framework of "stem duchies" and Altstämme (lit.

While this nomenclature became generally accepted in traditional Germanic philology, it has also been described as "inherently inaccurate" as these ancient ethnic boundaries (as understood in the 19th century) bore little or limited resemblance to the actual or historical linguistic situation of the Germanic languages.

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.

[20] During the expansion into France and Germany, many Frankish people remained in the original core Frankish territories in the north (i.e. southern Netherlands, Flanders, a small part of northern France, and the adjoining area in Germany centered on Cologne).

A widening cultural divide grew between the Franks remaining in the north and the rulers far to the south.

By 900 AD the language spoken was recognizably an early form of Dutch, but that might also have been the case earlier.

[21][22] The Franks expanded south into Gaul as the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century.

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.

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 resulting language, Old High German, can be neatly contrasted with Low Franconian, which for the most part did not experience the shift.

Although the practice of alluding to tribal names from the Migration Period when naming dialect groups during the early stages of Germanic Philology was common as the linguistic borders of historical ancestor dialects were, at the time, thought to closely mirror the supposed tribal duchies of the Frankish Empire at the start of the Early Middle Ages, for many of the varieties grouped under Franconian, the diachronical connection to the actual Frankish language remains unclear.

Old Franconian has introduced the modern French word for the nation, France (Francia), meaning 'land of the Franks'.

Old Franconian has also left many etyma in the different northern langues d'oïl such as Burgundian, Champenois, Lorrain, Norman, Picard and Walloon, more than in Standard French, and not always the same ones.

Most Franconian words with the phoneme w changed it to gu when entering Old French and other Romance languages; however, the northern langues d'oil such as Picard, Norman, Walloon, Burgundian, Champenois an Lorrain retained the /w/ or turned it into /v/.

[30] Franconian speech habits are also responsible[citation needed] for the replacement of Latin cum ("with") with od ← apud "at", then with avuec ← apud hoc "at it" ≠ Italian, Spanish con) in Old French (Modern French avec), and for the preservation of Latin nominative homo "man" as an impersonal pronoun: cf.