ABSTRACT
French is a member of the group of languages, derived from Latin, which gradually came into existence after the final disintegration of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. Languages derived from the speech of the Romans are referred to as the ‘Romance languages’, the main ones being French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian and RhetoRomance (see Harris and Vincent 1988). It makes sense to begin a discussion of the development of French from dialect to standard with a section devoted to the formation of the Gallo-Romance dialects, so this is what we will undertake in the next two chapters. However, since the question of the linguistic fragmentation of Latin occupies a central place in Romance linguistics and has thrown up a correspondingly large bibliography, it is unlikely that the two chapters which follow will avoid the twin pitfalls of unoriginality and superficiality.
