A European Informational Website
learn more
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300 AD. It was known at the time as the ''langue d'oïl'' to distinguish it from the langue d'oc, (also then called Provençal) which bordered these areas to the south.
The Gaulish language, a Celtic language, slowly became extinct during the long centuries of Roman domination. A handful of Gaulish words survive in contemporary French: words like , "oak tree", and , "plough", are Gaulish survivals, but fewer than two hundred words of modern French have a Gaulish etymology; Delamarre (2003 pp.389-90) lists 167. Latin was the common language of the western Roman world, and opened up a wider world to its speakers than Gaulish did, so it grew at the expense of Gaulish.
In one sense, Old French began when the Roman Empire conquered the territory it called Gaul during the conquests of Julius Caesar, which were substantially completed by 51 BC. The Romans introduced the Latin language into southern France starting in around 120 BC, when they occupied southern Gaul during the Punic Wars.
Starting during the period when Plautus was writing, the phonological structure of classical Latin began to change, yielding the vulgar Latin that was the common spoken language of the western Roman world. This vulgar Latin began to vary strongly from the classical language in its phonology; spoken Latin, rather than the somewhat artificial literary language of classical Latin, was the ancestor of the Romance languages including Old French. Some Gaulish words influenced Vulgar Latin and thus, not only Old French but also other Romance languages. For example classical Latin was replaced in common parlance by vulgar Latin , derived from Gaulish caballos (Delamare 2003 p.96) thus giving Modern French , Catalan , Italian , Portuguese , Spanish , Romanian , and (borrowed from Norman) English .
The Frankish language had a large impact on the vocabulary of Old French as a result of the Frankish conquest of much of the territory of modern France by the Franks during the Migration Period. The current and older names of the language, français, is derived from the name of the Franks. A number of other Germanic peoples, including the Burgundians, were active in the territory at that time; the Germanic languages spoken by the Franks, Burgundians, and others were not written languages, and at this remove it is often difficult to identify from which specific Germanic source a given Germanic word in French is derived. Philologists such as Pope (1934) estimate that perhaps fifteen percent of the vocabulary of modern French derives from Germanic sources; this vocabulary includes a large number of common words like ''haïr'' ‘to hate’; ''bateau'' ‘boat’, and ''hache'' ‘axe’, which all derive from Germanic sources. It has been suggested that the passé composé and other compound verbs used in French conjugation are also the result of Germanic influences.
In addition to the Germanic words that were introduced through Frankish, other Germanic words in Old French appeared as a result of Norman settlements in Normandy during the 10th century. These words came from the Old Norse spoken by the Norsemen who settled in northern France during the period; their settlement was legitimised and made permanent in 911 under Rollo of Normandy.
While the earliest documents said to be written in French are the Oaths of Strasbourg (treaties and charters entered by king Charles the Bald in 842), it is probable that the text is in an older Langue d'oïl, or even Gallo-Romance, being what could be called a mixture of vulgar Latin and early Romance. It is hard to determine from the text we have how they were pronounced:
Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa...
(For the love of God and for the Christian people, and our common salvation, from this day forward, as God will give me the knowledge and the power, I will defend my brother Charles with my help in everything...)
Beginning with the House of Capet, which was begun by Hugh Capet in 987, the culture of northern France began to develop, and its political ascendency over the southern areas of Aquitaine and Tolosa / Toulouse was slowly but firmly asserted. The current French language, however, did not begin to become the common speech of the entire nation of France until after the French Revolution.
Another example of an early Langue d'oïl or Gallo-Romance text is the Eulalia sequence, which probably is also much closer to the spoken language of the time than the Oaths of Strasbourg.
One profound change that affected French, and every other Romance language, reordered the vowel system of classical Latin. Latin had ten distinct vowels: long and short versions of A, E, I, O, U, and three (or four) diphthongs, AE, OE, AU, and according to some, UI.[1] What happened to Vulgar Latin is set forth in the table.
Both the diphthongs AE and OE also fell in with /e/. AU was initially retained, and turned into /O/ after the original /O/ fell victim to further changes.
Thus, the ten vowel system of Classical Latin, which relied on phonemic vowel length was new-modelled into a system in which vowel length distinctions were suppressed and alterations of vowel quality became phonemic. Because of this change, the stress on accented syllables became much more pronounced in Vulgar Latin than in Classical Latin. This tended to cause unaccented syllables to become less distinct, while working further changes on the sounds of the accented syllables.
Old French underwent more thorough alterations of its sound system than did the other Romance languages. Vowel breaking was something that occurred generally in Proto-Western-Romance (here, Proto-Romance), although with different results in each of the daughter languages; Latin FOCU(M) (originally "hearth") becomes Italian fuoco, Romanian and Catalan foc, Spanish fuego, and French feu (all meaning "fire"). But in Old French the phenomenon went further than in any other Romance language; of the seven vowels inherited from Latin, only remained essentially unchanged. In stressed syllables:
Note that Latin AU did not share the fate of or ; Latin AURUM > OF or, "gold": not *oeur nor *our. Latin AU must have been retained at the time these changes were affecting Proto-Romance.
Changes affecting the consonants were also quite pervasive in Old French. Old French shared with the rest of the Vulgar Latin world the loss of final -M. Since this sound was basic to the Latin noun case system, its loss levelled the distinctions upon which the synthetic Latin syntax relied, and forced the Romance languages to adapt a more analytic syntax based on word order. Old French also dropped many internal consonants when they followed the strongly stressed syllable; Latin PETRA(M) > Proto-Romance * > OF pierre; cf. Spanish piedra ("stone").
During the Old French period, Latin became , the lip-rounded sound that is written 'u' in Modern French.
In some contexts, became , still written oi in Modern French. During the early Old French period this sound was pronounced as the writing suggests, as . This sound developed variously in different varieties of Oïl language - most of the surviving languages maintain a pronunciation as /we/ - but literary French adopted a dialectal phonology /wa/. The doublet of français and François in modern French orthography demonstrates this mix of dialectal features.
At some point during the Old French period, vowels with a following nasal consonant began to be nasalized. While the process of losing the final nasal consonant took place after the Old French period, the nasal vowels that characterise modern French appeared during the period in question.
Old French, along with Portuguese, exhibits the most thorough phonetic changes from Latin, as opposed to relatively conservative Romance languages like Spanish, Italian or Romanian. As the example of pierre from PETRA(M) shows, many interior consonants were lost, swallowed up in the strong word stress accent.
Through Proto-Western-Romance:
Through Proto-Gallo-Ibero-Romance:
Through Early Old French, in approximate order:
Through Old French, of c. 1100 AD:
Through Late Old French: c. 1250-1300 AD:
Old French maintained a two-case system, with a nominative case and an oblique case, longer than did some other Romance languages (e.g. Spanish and Italian). Case distinctions, at least in the masculine gender, were marked on both the definite article and on the noun itself. Thus, the masculine noun li voisins, "the neighbour" (Latin VICÍNU(S) /wi'ki:nus/ > Proto-Romance */vetsinu(s)/ > OF voisins /voizi<sup>n</sup>s/) was declined as follows:
Singular:
Nominative: li voisins (Latin ille vicinus) Oblique: le voisin (Latin illum vicinum)
Plural:
Nominative: li voisin (Latin illi vicini) Oblique: les voisins (Latin illos vicinos)
In later Old French, these distinctions became moribund. When the distinctions were marked enough, sometimes both forms survived, with a lexical difference: both li sire (nominative, Latin SENIOR) and le seigneur (oblique, Latin SENIORE(M)) survive in the vocabulary of later French as different ways to refer to a feudal lord. As in most other Romance languages, it was the oblique case form that usually survived to become the modern French form: l'enfant (the child) represents the old accusative; the OF nominative was li enfes. But some modern French nouns perpetuate the old nominative; modern French soeur (OF suer) represents the Latin nominative SÓROR; the OF oblique form seror, from Latin accusative SORÓREM, no longer survives.
As in Spanish and Italian, the neuter gender was eliminated, and old neuter nouns became masculine. Some Latin neuter plurals were re-analysed as feminine singulars, though; for example, Latin GAUDIU(M) was more widely used in the plural form GAUDIA, which was taken for a singular in Vulgar Latin, and ultimately led to modern French la joie, "joy" (feminine singular).
Nouns were declined in the following declensions:
Class I is derived from the Latin first declension. Class II is derived from the Latin second declension. Class Ia mostly comes from feminine third-declension nouns in Latin. Class IIa generally stems from second-declension nouns ending in -er and from third-declension masculine nouns; note that in both cases, the Latin nominative singular did not end in -s, and this is preserved in Old French.
Class III nouns show a separate form in the nominative singular that does not occur in any of the other forms. IIIa nouns ended in -ÁTOR, -ATÓREM in Latin, and preserve the stress shift; IIIb nouns likewise had a stress shift from -O to -ÓNEM. IIIc nouns are an Old French creation and have no clear Latin antecedent. IIId nouns represent various other types of third-declension Latin nouns with stress shift or irregular masculine singular (SÓROR, SORÓREM; ÍNFANS, INFÁNTEM; PRÉSBYTER, PRESBÝTEREM; SÉNIOR, SENIÓREM; CÓMES, CÓMITEM).
The verb in Old French was somewhat less distinct from the rest of Proto-Romance than the noun was. It shared in the loss of the Latin passive voice, and the reduction of the Latin futures of the AMABO type (I will love) to Proto-Romance *amare habeo (lit. "I have to love"), which became amerai in Old French.
In Latin, certain verbs shifted the accented syllable based on the Latin accentual system, which depended on vowel length. Thus, the Latin verb ÁMO, "I love," stressed on the first syllable, changed to AMÁMUS, "we love". Because the Latin stressed syllable affected Old French vowels, this syllable shift created a large number of strong verbs in Old French. ÁMO yielded j'aim, while AMÁMUS, moving the stress away from the first syllable, yielded nous amons. There were at least 11 types of alternations; examples of these various types are j'aim, nous amons; j'achat, nous achetons; j'adois, nous adesons; je mein, nouns menons; j'achief, nous achevons; je conchi, nous concheons; je pris, nous proisons; je demeur, nous demourons; je muer, nous mourons; j'aprui, nous aproions. In Modern French almost all of these verbs have been leveled, generally with the "weak" (unstressed) form predominating (but modern aimer/nous aimons is an exception). A few alternations remain, however, in what are now known as irregular verbs, such as je tiens, nous tenons or je meurs, nous mourons.
In general, Old French verbs show much less analogical reformation than in Modern French. The Old French first singular aim, for example, comes directly from Latin AMO, while modern aime has an analogical -e added. The subjunctive forms j'aim, tu ains, il aint are direct preservations of Latin AMEM, AMES, AMET, while the modern forms j'aime, tu aimes, il aime have been completely reformed on the basis of verbs in the other conjugations. The simple past also shows extensive analogical reformation and simplification in Modern French as compared with Old French.
The Latin pluperfect was preserved in very early Old French as a past tense with a value similar to a preterite or imperfect. E.g. (Cantilène de sainte Eulalie, 878 AD) 'avret' < HABUERAT, 'voldret' < VOLUERAT (Old Occitan also preserved this tense, with a conditional value).
Non-finite forms:
Auxiliary verb: avoir
Non-finite forms:
Auxiliary verb: avoir
Non-finite forms:
Auxiliary verb: avoir
Non-finite forms:
auxiliary verb: avoir, earlier aveir
Since Old French did not consist of a single standard, competing administrative varieties were propagated by the provincial courts and chanceries.
The French of Paris was one of a number of standards, including:
This Oïl language is the ancestor of several languages spoken today, including:
Main Article at Medieval French literature
See also: Languages of France, Anglo-Norman literature
Contents