French

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, that are sharply distinguished from those of the south of France, langue d’oc (oïl and oc 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 GalloRomance at all, but rather as closely linked with Catalan, the resultant grouping being distinct from Hispano-Romance also. Within these major dialectal areas, further linguistic fragmentation took place, diver-

gence being strongly abetted by the lack of social cohesion during the so-called Dark Ages. One of the dialects of the langue d’oïl that emerged in this way was francien (a modern name), the dialect of the Ile-de-France (where Paris is located), and it is from this dialect that, once circumstances arose which facilitated the growth of a national language, modern standard French has developed. (Another northern dialect was Norman, which had a profound influence on the development of English after the Norman invasion of England.) The establishment of a fixed royal court in Paris and the recrudescence of an educational and a legal system there, tended to favour the dialect of Paris and the surrounding area for the status of national language. Since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when francien gradually came to be accepted as a norm to aim towards, at least in writing and in cultivated speech in northern and central France, progress has been slow but steady. It is worth pointing out, however, that although the literary form of occitan, Provençal, never recovered from the devastation caused by the Albigensian

crusade, and although French came to be virtually ubiquitous as the written language after the Ordonnance (‘Decree’) de Villers-Cotterêts (1539), it was not until the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, particularly in the south, that French came to be wholly dominant within the boundaries of France, at first among the bourgeoisie and in the cities, and later in the more remote rural areas. Indeed, French’s long period of predominance as the major international language of culture and diplomacy significantly antedates its general use as a spoken language within France: by the end of the seventeenth century, French had in effect replaced Latin in the former role, to the point that the Berlin Academy was able to ask in 1782, as a matter of fact, ‘Qu’est-ce qui a rendu la langue françoise universelle?’ (‘What has made the French language universal?’). This situation persisted until the First World War and even beyond.