From the 12th century, several European vernacular languages, including French, began to be used in administrative acts, in place of the written language in a monopoly situation: Latin. This decisive transition does not only concern political documents but also literature. It is the constitution of a “written language”: medieval editors who write in vernacular, allow their language to acquire communication skills hitherto reserved for Latin.
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The existence of Strasbourg oaths in 842, which are oaths of mutual assistance between the grandsons of Charlemagne (bilingual document in the Gallo-Romance language, “ancestor” of French, and in old German), is not sufficient to identify the beginnings of the use of French in administrative documents and political acts: it is necessary that the use of language corresponds to current practice, if the state of the archives allows this to be observed.
The emergence of vernacular languages
A distinction must be made within the vernacular languages (local languages spoken by the community) from the Latin, between the Romance languages and those belonging to other linguistic families (Germanic, Celtic and Slavic). As long as the link between the Romance dialects and the Latin mother tongue remains, Latin continues to be used in writing. Non-Romance languages, independent from Latin, appear in charters (administrative and legal written acts) earlier, in particular in non-Romanized territories (Scandinavia, Middle Europe …). It is certain that in the whole of the medieval West, the first language of the charters remains the Latin which in fact accompanies the progression of Christianity. The Latin language, liturgical and scholarly, is used primarily for the establishment of legal acts involving ecclesiastics. Vernacular languages enter charters in two different ways: the first consists of a clear replacement of Latin by another language; Acts are written entirely in the vernacular. This almost immediate passage is apparently valid for French. A vernacular can also be inserted by words then sentences, in acts written in Latin.
Domaine d’oïl, domaine d’oc
The linguistic border between langue d’oc and langue d’oïl, separates the regions where the Occitan languages are spoken (or Occitano-Romance languages) and those where the languages of Oïl (Gallo-Romance languages) are used. This transitional space is a zone of contact between the oc and oïl dialects, which is embodied in dialects influenced by each linguistic domain. The Occitan language has been spoken since around the 8th century, by a population that occupies a space delimited between the Atlantic and the Po plain on the one hand, between the north of The Massif Central and Pyrenees on the other hand. Provinces then regions share this well-diversified linguistic space, which offers the following variants: ancient Occitan, Aranese, Auvergnat, Béarnais, Gascon, Gavot, Limousin, Occitan Languedocien, Provencal, Nissart, Vivarois. What do the Bearn and the country of Nice? The only element uniting them in the long term is the language of their inhabitants which is a local representation of Occitan.
The langue d’oïl is a Gallo-Romance language that developed in the northern part of France, the south of the Belgium and the Channel Islands. It then encompasses different cousin dialects (French, Orleans, Burgundian-Morvandiau, Champagne, Lorraine Roman, Picard, Walloon, Norman, Gallo, Angevin, Tourangeau, Sarthois, Mayennais, Percheron, Franc-Comtois, Poitevin, Saintongeais, Berrichon, Bourbonnais) . This northern linguistic group has retained an important Celtic substrate and was greatly influenced by the Germanic dialects. From one dialect of Oïl to another, we manage to understand each other thanks to administrative writing. TO Paris (in the 11th-12th centuries), we speak a French “porous” to all these dialects, which becomes a linguistic reference in the 14th century, because the city is now the political and administrative capital of the kingdom.
The progression of the French language in the kingdom of France
French is the “vulgar” (living) medieval language which is experiencing its strongest expansion outside its territory of origin, the domaine d’oïl. The first “export” of French followed the Norman conquest of England in 1066: a cousin variant of French, Anglo-Norman, established itself in the British Isles. While the kingdom’s clergy perpetuated Latin habits, in the years 1230-1240, the practice of French spread through legal and administrative acts established by the Dukes of Lorraine and the Counts of Luxembourg. In the kingdom of France, the dukes of Champagne and of Burgundy (large vassal fiefdoms of the king) begin to use it. French enters the Duchy of Brittany during the years 1250 to 1280; it spread from the middle of the 13th century in Flanders. On the other hand, the center and the west of the domaine d’oïl remained very faithful to Latin throughout the 13th century.
French, when it becomes the preferred language by the king, will gradually replace the other vernacular languages of the kingdom. In southern Romance France, the French language penetrated quite slowly: introduced around 1250 in the Dauphiné, it spilled over into the lands of the Germanic Empire from the end of the 13th century (French-speaking Switzerland, Savoy and Val d’Aosta) and imposed itself Lyon in the 15th century. In the field of oc, the penetration of legal French did not begin with the crusade of Albigensian. It is late and progressive: present after 1350 in Auvergne and Limousin, French is essential in Languedoc and Provence after 1450. At the beginning of the 16th century, only the Pyrenees maintained a production written exclusively in the Occitan language; however in the area of oc, the role of the king’s language is still limited because Latin and the local vernaculars coexist with written French.
In the 14th century, French became the language of the royal administration at the local level of bailiwicks and seneschalges, then at the central level of the Chancellery and Parliament, to the point of supplanting Latin after the ordinance of Villers-Cotterets from 1539. 40% of the words appearing in our dictionaries were forged between the 14th and 16th centuries: this is the period of “Middle French”. THE’emergence of a standardized linguistic form, present-day French, did not take place before the 17th century, with the creation of the French Academy.
A multilingual metropolitan France
France today is largely multilingual thanks to its exceptional linguistic heritage, made up of five Romance languages (domaine d’oïl, Occitan, Catalan, Franco-Provençal and Corsican), three Germanic languages (Alsatian, Francic and West Flemish ), a Celtic language (Breton) and a pre-Indo-European language (Basque). Not to mention the Creole languages based on French lexicals (America, West Indies, Indian Ocean, Pacific) and all the languages of immigration!
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