FRENCH WRITING IN IRELAND

The earliest surviving French writing in Ireland dates from the end of the twelfth century. In England, the victory of William the Conqueror in 1066 had brought the Norman dialect of French to the ruling classes, and over the next century a distinctive AngloNorman dialect of French evolved. This is the French that came to Ireland with the coming of the Normans. Unfortunately, the surviving corpus of French in Ireland is too small to show that a distinctively Hiberno-Norman dialect of French can be said to have evolved in its turn.