Just how did French end up being one of the most scientific, diplomatic and awkward languages in the world? And why didn’t it turn out like Italian and Spanish? Below is a brief explanation of how this all came to be.
To start with, we need to go back to the language spoken in the area before anything like French arrived: Gaulois. Not the cigarette, more like the cartoon characters Asterix and Obelix. They’re Gauls. They lived in Gaule. They were Celtic, like the Britons on the British Isles before the Romans came. They were the ones that thought France was nice enough as it was and didn’t carry on up to the rainy island. They all spoke a very similar language from tribe to tribe and so for the sake of argument we’ll call it Gaulois.
But of course the Romans eventually turned up. Everywhere. Julius Cesar is to blame, in fact, as it was under his rule that the legions marched in. They didn’t force Latin on anyone, they just made sure that you had to speak it to get anywhere in life. To be a Roman citizen, for instance, you’d have to throw everything you knew away and embrace your new, sophisticated overlords. The Celtic oral tradition gave way under the weight of new Latin schools springing up for the ambitious movers and shakers. Vulgar Latin, the Latin of the people, a cut down version of Classical Latin that would probably be called Latin Light today, moved in and made itself comfortable in very little time. By the 5th Century the Gaulois language group had disappeared leaving only around 70 words in the Latin language, many of which exist to this day.
This new street Latin evolved into what is known by French historians as Roman, leaving Classical Latin for prestigious use only. Roman simplified word conjugations (endings), picked up some articles (le, la, un, une) and made its own version of the conditional tense up (I would go there, if…).
From 375 AD the Germanic tribes decided it was their turn to have a go at invading. It is nice land, after all. Amongst these tribes were the Franks (their own name meaning “free”) who took the northern region and set the “langue d’oïl” wheels in motion. If you weren’t there at the time, that was apparently how they said “yes” in the north (oïl) and in the south the Wisigoths occupied Spain and moved into France bringing their word for “yes”, “oc”, thus the “langue d’oc“.
Clovis lead the Franks to victory over them all in 486, converted to Catholicism and set up the Frankish Kingdom, making the Germanic language they spoke the lingua franca. No, a lingua franca is a language that people not sharing a common tongue speak, not the case here, but it does come from when Arabic rulers referred to all Europeans as Franks and used a mix of Italian, French, Greek and Persian to communicate throughout the Middle East as a language of diplomacy. But that is veering slightly off topic and ahead on the timeline.
The Frankish language gave over 500 words to modern French, including its name. But the initial invader’s language prevails and Roman, spoken in over 600 varieties in France alone, survived the Germanic panic.
A document written in 842 AD is laid out in both Frankish and Roman. It’s called the Serments de Strasbourg and was the first recorded text written in both languages. Historians consider this text to be the birth of French. The first literary text written in French is called la Séquence de sainte Eulalie and is a 29 verse poem written in 880 about saintly martyrdom.
Old French evolved from this new culture of writing things down. The French kings stopped talking Frankish one sunny day in 987, when Hugues Capet was crowned king of Île-de-France (the Paris region) and claimed he didn’t “understand a bloody word of that awful Frankish nonsense”, going on to mimic the sounds of his forefathers for a good five minutes, causing general ripples of polite, fearful laughter around his throne. Then in 1119, moving swiftly on, the word King of France was used for the first time instead of the usual King of the Francs, being referred to by a pope as a “special son of the Roman church”.
It was known as françois then, but the word français was born at this time too. Yes, they had misspelled it, but they found that out in their own time just centuries later. We now call this early stuff Old French, evolved from the Oïl (oui) language and it spread out from Paris as a fancy, royal way of speaking. The aristocrats jumped on that bandwagon pretty quickly. Latin remained the language of choice for churches, universities and a small group of medieval graffiti artists and underground rappers who liked how easy it was to rhyme in Latin.
When French started to be used for official documents in Parliament and the King’s court it became known as Middle French, not at the time of course, they thought they were speaking modern French. It took a long time for them to figure out how wrong they were. But they liked it and it stuck and so Latin took a back seat and Middle French caught on in the upper circles of society.
During the Renaissance period the printing press appeared. It was like a very, very slow internet that spread standard French spelling and literature all over the country. They could have been posh and printed in Latin, but as there were far more French readers it made financial sense to sell to the masses. Printed dictionaries appeared and the language flourished. Yet a group of proud François speakers, lead by Joachim du Bellay signed a document in 1549 that claimed the French language was poor and not adapted to poetic expression. They decided to enrich it by creating words from Latin, Greek and regional languages, playing their part in maturing French into what it is today.
After this explosion of Frenchism, the aptly named François de Malherbe set out the grammar rules for a perfectly pure, rigorous and clear language – something that didn’t really happen in English. If you want someone to blame for an awkward language, I’m not saying you should, but I’ll just draw your attention to this particular man. Future writers celebrated his work, “Enfin Malherbe vint…” finally Malherbe came, they cried. And cried.
In the 17th century French became firmly established as the language to use in France, despite only being spoken by just one million people out of 20 million Frenchmen. The nobles, bourgeois and businessmen were the main culprits. In 1635 the Académie Française was created by Richelieu. It further cemented French’s position with dictionaries, grammar books, rhetorical and poetic guides, spelling and pronunciation rules.
The first philosophical writings were written in 1637 by René Descartes (Discours de la méthode) starting a long tradition of French language nonsense intelligent writing, replacing the Latin normally used for that kind of pretentious pontification noble etching.
More work was to be carried out on the language by the nerdiest men France ever saw, such as Claude Favre de Vaugelas (1585-1659) who wrote Remarques sur la langue française, that went through the whole language removing “low words” (les mots bas) such as Italianisms, old words, countryside words and even some technical words.
By the 18th century French had such a good reputation that it was being used as a language of diplomacy, a status it would enjoy until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. During the 18th century churches, colleges and universities continued to use Latin while the people of France received no formal education so that they could keep working the land. On the eve of the French Revolution, some say that only a quarter of the French population spoke French, the rest speaking regional languages: in the north they spoke Oïl, Oc and Occitan in the south, Breton, Basque and Catalan too, Franco-provençal (Franche-Comté, Lyon, Switzerland and the Savoie), Flemmish, Alsacien and many more were spoken. But not French.
With the Bourgeois Revolution winning back power, they imposed their language, French. Revolutionaries declared war on regional languages, such as Henri-Baptiste Grégoire who deemed his own country to still be a “Tower of Babel” in 1794. He described French as a language and all the other methods of communication feudal fossils and patois. A decree was enacted to this effect, sanctioning the War on Languages once and for all. The concept of one nation and one language really came together at this time in France.
Napoleon, being Corsican, spoke his own language and didn’t try very hard to support French, handing the schools over to the church, who then proceeded to teach Latin so as not to break from holy tradition. Or something. But he did set up the Académie Française again after it was taken out of action during the Revolution. The scientific and industrial revolutions added many thousands of words through new dictionaries (Larousse being one of them) and in 1833 primary education became available nationwide, followed by free and compulsory schooling in 1881, sending French out into the country. Schools punished children who spoke any form of dialect in class, effectively and quite literally stamping out regional languages. By the end of the 19th century the French then was pretty much as it is today.
Today the French language is spoken by around 184 million people (or 2.7% of the world’s population, placing it 11th) and taught on five continents. It’s one of the six official languages and one of the two working languages (the other being English) of the United Nations, still carrying its importance as an international language of diplomacy.
As for France itself, French is finally the language of culture, administration and everyday speech throughout the country – something that hasn’t always been the case. There remain regional differences, some of which are celebrated and promoted*, but overall there is complete understanding from north to south, east to west. Circumstance still has a role to play in French, however, as one person can use the language differently in situations that may require formality or informality, written or spoken, classic or urban French. But the major regional languages have faded away, despite having been in common usage until the 50s. Catalan remains an example of one of the larger regional languages that still survives today.
As you can see, French didn’t pop up over night, but has a rich history full of key figures whose power and influence shaped the way people speak French over their coffee and Gauloise today. Now, I know that wasn’t very brief as blog posts go, but you did just read through 2000 years of history in under a day (I hope) so it was brief in a relative way. Said Einstein.
*”Chez les ch’tis” is a film featuring Danny Boon based in the very north of France where the language is quite particular, he learns swear words and tries to order in “ch’ti”, a form of the Picard language:
