ABSTRACT

If the sociolinguistic situation in Gaul was already marked by variation during the years of political and social stability afforded by the Roman Empire, the upheavals provoked by the great migrations of the fifth century triggered in the Latin language a process of wholesale dialectalisation. In peripheral areas of the western Empire (shaded on Map 5) – in north Africa, Britain, Brittany, parts of Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine and south Germany – Latin speech was eliminated completely. Elsewhere, two centuries of socioeconomic disintegration produced a fragmentation of Latin speech from which there ultimately emerged the Romance languages.