Historical overview

THE thirteen volumes of Brunot (1966) provide much information on the history of the formation of contemporary French, while Wolf 1983a, Genouvrier (1986, 114-38), Grillo 1989, Rickard 1989, among others, summarise the process of language control and codification, and the relevant groups and persons involved, to the present day.

The Frankish kings who invaded France in the fifth and sixth centuries, and their successors through to the period of the French Revolution in 1789, attempted to expand their control of territory from northern France and particularly the Paris basin towards ‘natural’ frontiers of the sea, rivers and mountains. This military process was accompanied by the spread of their dialect of the French language, which had developed from the Latin spoken by Roman administrators and the soldiers, traders and settlers who followed them and established themselves across Europe. The first ‘French’ text, recognisably distinct from Latin, is generally regarded as the Life of Ste Eulalie (842) and the slow linguistic development which was to follow over the Middle Ages led to the modern language, recognisable as such from about 1600 and codified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The development reflects in part the history of the triumph of the Ile de France dialect over other langue d'oïl dialects and then over the regional languages, and in part, and closely associated, that of the triumph of centralising, élitist, military, diplomatic and ecclesiastical power over feudal fragmentation and over the lower orders of society.