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By Root 697 0

French was the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterěts in 1539, by which King Franαois I, among many other provisions, required that official documents, whether from courts or parish registers, should all be produced en langage maternel fronαois et non autrement—in French mother tongue, and not otherwise, specifically not in Latin.27 But despite the homely-sounding phrase, the king was in fact referring to his own mother tongue, not that of his subjects: the act was interpreted as requiring the use of Parisian French, and so provoked merveilleuses complaintes (’wondrous complaints’) in the Provençal-speaking south.28 The French political centre was henceforth to be language conscious, and to take action to enforce consistency at the official level, despite the persistence of different spoken languages in its realms.

What sort of language was French? To the ear, a major characteristic of French among its Romance cousins was the loss of almost all vowels in final syllables, and later of final consonants. (Final a usually survived, but was reduced to an indistinct [ē] ‘uh’ sound.) This slack pronunciation led to some major changes in the grammar, due to the breakdown of the Latin system of meaningful word endings (inflexion), at least in so far as they marked the function of nouns in sentences, and the person (I vs you vs he/she/it) of verbs. So French became a language with a rather rigid word order, and strings of short pronouns up at the front of sentences. Where Latin had dico tibi illud, ‘I tell you that’, French has je te le dis [žētētēdi], and the Latin ending -o to mark the subject ‘I’ has effectively been replaced by a separable subject prefix je [žə].* But in other ways, French was rather like Portuguese, replacing n and m at the end of syllables with a nasalised twang, changing its y sound to [ž], and voicing s to [z] when it came between vowels. Common Romance unum bonum vinum rubium, ‘a good wine red’, became in France un bon vin rouge. L after a vowel mostly changed to [w] (as it does in Cockney and Estuary English), and was written with u: maledictum, ‘cursed’, came out as maudit, pellem, ‘skin’, as peau, collum, ‘neck’, as cou.

And French was also prey to some extreme processes of vowel strangulation, especially of what are called mid vowels, e and o: so much so that its precise pronunciation has varied greatly down the centuries, and of course been given considerable scope for language snobbery, if people’s diphthongs did not come out just right. These are the processes that have played havoc with French spelling, so that what was long ago written (and pronounced, more or less) seniōres rēgālēs fāmōsī dēbent habēre unum bellum palātium, ‘famous royal lords must have a fine palace’, came first to be pronounced much as it is now spelt, les seigneurs royaux fameux doivent avoir un beau palais, but then went on to sound quite different: [le seiñœr rwayo famœ dwavt avwar œT bo paləP].

In the early second millennium AD, this language began to spread outside France. Notably, in 1066 it was transplanted north of the English Channel, by Norman invaders, who themselves had been speaking it only for a couple of generations. (See Chapter 12, ‘Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French’, p. 458.) As it turned out, the advance of the language was not permanent. It flourished for over two centuries as a language for the elite in England, but gradually lost touch with the Ile-de-France. As Chaucer wrote of his Prioress towards the end of the fourteenth century:

And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe

For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.29

Then came the Black Death: a social revolution followed, and English-speaking commoners were able to move into more influential positions in the English cities. French died out in England.*

About the same time, the Crusades also spread French outside its native soil, but in the opposite direction. These military escapades derived most of their support from France, and they did succeed in setting up Frankish domains in Palestine which lasted