ABSTRACT
French is a Romance language descended directly from the (Vulgar) Latin that came to be spoken in what was then Gaul during the period of the Roman Empire. As that Empire crumbled, a number of major dialectal divisions developed, which do not necessarily correspond to present-day political or linguistic frontiers. Such a major division was to be found within medieval France (see Map 9.1), with the dialects of the north and centre (and part of modern Belgium), known collectively as langue d’oïl, sharply distinguished from those of the (south of France, langue d’ocïl oïl and being the words for ‘yes’ in the two regions), with a third smaller area in the southeast, known as Franco-Provençal, generally taken to include the French dialects of Switzerland and in the Aosta Valley in Italy. The division between north and south is so marked that it has frequently been argued that, on purely linguistic grounds, the dialects of the south, now generally known collectively as occitan, are best not regarded as Gallo-Romance at all, but rather as closely linked with Catalan, the resultant grouping being distinct from Hispano-Romance also.
