French Inside Out

The Worldwide Development of the French Language in the Past, the Present and the Future

Henriette Walter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415076692
• eBook ISBN: 9781134902057
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this comprehensive introduction, Henriette Walter provides the reader with a panoramic view of the development of the French language in the past, present and future. She takes the reader on a rapid and lively journey through the historical development of the language from its Latin origins to the present day. She goes on to set the language in its linguistic context by surveying its surviving and vanished dialects and regional variations of the language within France. Widening her focus, Walter examines French throughout the world, giving examples of the pronunciation and vocabulary of each region or nation. Finally she looks at French today: its structure, the effects of social change on the language, and its future in an increasingly English dominated world. This stimulating and entertaining account offers students of French a clear and accessible introduction to the language. The wealth of information it provides is reflected in the extensive bibliography, four indices and numerous world lists, maps and diagrams.

1
WHERE DOES FRENCH COME FROM?

Ten landmarks in the history of French

TEN LANDMARKS

In search of origins

French has not always existed, just as France has not always had the same frontiers, but the date of birth of this offshoot of Latin remains shrouded in mystery. It was only around the ninth century, a thousand years after the conquest of Gaul in 51 BC, that the ancestors of the modern French people noticed that the Latin which they thought they were speaking had become French without their realising it.

However, it is not easy to say when that happened. What is certain is that for centuries the ancestors of the French were obliged to live with their Roman, Frankish, Burgundian, Visigoth and Norman neighbours, and they were obliged, between skirmishes, to talk to them, share their meals, and, perhaps, woo their daughters. And all of that involved communication problems, since, originally, these peoples did not speak the same language. French is to some extent a result of these encounters and contacts.

Words change pronunciation

The words used by the ancestors of the French have been handed down to modern times, but they have suffered the ravages of time and are not always easily recognised. The French word muer no longer bears much resemblance to the Latin word MUTARE from which it derives. But if we analyse ancient manuscripts, we can reconstitute the stages the word has gone through. In the eighth century,³ the use of the graphic sign dh to represent the Latin t between two vowels (mutare>mudhare) shows that the consonant had weakened. It was probably pronounced like the d of nada in Modern Spanish. During the centuries which followed, this consonant, which was already articulated weakly, became even more attenuated and finally disappeared completely, at the latest around the eleventh century:

MUTARE → mudhare → mudher → muer

Thus mutare became muer, but until the fourteenth century this infinitive muer was pronounced with the final consonant sounded, like the modern French word fer. This final consonant in its turn began to weaken during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, resulting in the modern pronunciation with no final r sound: muer in the infinitive is now pronounced like the past participle mué. The metamorphoses of this final consonant in the sixteenth century will be discussed later (see pp.–pp). In this case, evolution modified the form of the word; in other cases, it is the meaning which has changed.

Words change meaning

The Romans had two words for ‘head’:

• a noble word, CAPUT, which evolved phonetically into the French word chef, first with the meaning of ‘head’ in Old French, and then with that of ‘the person at the head of, the boss’;
• a familiar word, TESTA, which originally meant ‘earthen pot’.

The Romans spoke jokingly of their testa (their ‘mug’) in much the same way that modern French people say vous vous payez ma fiole (Courteline) or il a pris un coup sur la cafetière. Nowadays, the meaning of ‘earthen pot’ has completely disappeared from the French word tête (derived from TESTA). By contrast, tête has kept all of the meanings of the word CAPUT, both ‘head’ and ‘the person at the head of.

As for the word chef, the formal representative of the Latin CAPUT, it still retains the meaning ‘head’ in a few expressions such as couvre-chef or opiner du chef.

In language as in nature, nothing is ever lost completely, and the history of a language is made up of these shifts which modify sometimes the sounds, sometimes the meanings, and sometimes both the sounds and the meanings of words.

Linguists speak of phonetic change when it is the sounds which are altered (MUTARE becomes muer) and of semantic change in the case of meanings (in Latin ‘earthen pot’ becomes ‘head’). Some of these developments will be analysed by way of example in the historical section of this book.

The history of the language

Some of these changes will be approached via the history of the peoples who spoke French, because the history of a language depends above all on the history of the people who speak or chose to speak it. Of all the facts which have marked the history of France, we shall single out only a small number of events to serve as landmarks. They will afford the opportunity to provide some information about the linguistic changes which occurred at different times and they will help to explain the origin of some of these changes. If the distance in time between these landmarks is sometimes quite considerable, that is because, when we are talking about linguistic evolution, we have usually to count in centuries, if not in millennia.

Ten landmarks

Out of the long history of the peoples who have lived and spoken on French soil, we shall select only those events which have had consequences for the language.

We shall begin with a few brief comments on the languages of various origins which were spoken in France before the Roman conquest (Before the ‘Indo-Europeans’), and in particular on Gaulish (The age of the Gauls).

After Latin had been adopted by the inhabitants of Gaul, it was to undergo the influence of the Germanic languages spoken by the invaders (The age of the ‘Barbarians’), whilst nascent Christianity was to become one of the best channels for spreading this common Latin language (The age of the Christians).

It was during the reign of Charlemagne that people suddenly realised that the language they had always spoken was no longer Latin but a different language, one which the Norman invaders would also learn to speak (The Viking interlude).

Throughout the entire Middle Ages, the feudal lifestyle favoured the proliferation of regional forms of language (The age of dialects).

In the sixteenth century, François I was to give the ‘langue françoise’ its letters of nobility: from that time it replaced Latin as the written language, whilst people continued to speak patois in daily life (The triumph of French).

But the grammarians were on the qui vive and, at the end of the sixteenth century, forged the rules of ‘good usage’, taking as their model the language spoken at the Royal Court. This was the origin of the ‘classical’ language (The age of ‘good usage’).

A century went by, and it was the age of the Revolution: the Convention, enamoured of Jacobinic centralisation, was to deal the first blow to the vitality of the patois, which were deemed to be harmful to a Republic ‘one and indivisible’. In the meantime, the French language had also travelled and transplanted itself overseas (Canada, the colonies). We shall come back to this in the geographical section (see French outside France, pp.).

Finally, in the twentieth century, compulsory state education and the First World War on the one hand (The age of school) and mass communication (The age of the media) on the other were to play a decisive role in the shaping of Modern French.

In the following pages we shall look in greater detail at the events which we have just sketched out (see the table opposite) and see how, over the ages, the language has changed. These dips into history will be kept deliberately brief and superficial, since their sole purpose is to demonstrate the influence that events and people have had on the language. They will be an opportunity above all to present, for each of the periods under discussion, a few aspects of French in the areas of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

BEFORE THE ‘INDO-EUROPEANS’

The great family of the ‘Indo-Europeans’

There can be no doubt that, of all the events which have had an influence on the development of the French language, chronological priority must go to the abandonment of Gaulish after the Roman conquest. But where did that Gaulish language itself come from, and what do we know about it?

Celtic peoples from the region which is modern Germany had begun to cross the Rhine from the start of the first millennium before Jesus Christ. They spoke a Celtic tongue which no longer exists today: Gaulish.

This language belongs to the great family of Indo-European tongues,⁴ which also gave rise to French. Some six thousand years before our era, peoples who spoke so-called Indo-European languages were settled in the region of the Caucasus and the Black Sea. Some of these peoples migrated later towards India while others spread out over almost the entire area of Europe. Thus the Celts (Gauls) arrived in the region which was to become Gaul during the first millennium before Jesus Christ.

After thousands of years of evolution and entire centuries of which no written trace remains, it is difficult to draw up a real genealogical tree of these languages, but the linguists have invented a method which uses the similarities between the forms of certain words with the same meaning to produce groupings between apparently dissimilar languages, from which linguistic kinship can thus be established between them (see table 12).

As these concordances are verified by a large number of crosschecks, we can discard the hypothesis that they are no more than coincidence. In this way, it has been possible to draw up the table of Indo-European languages shown in the table on pp. 14–15.

See Table

---

HOW IS THE KINSHIP OF LANGUAGES ESTABLISHED?

By way of example, we shall look at the words for ‘fish’, ‘father’ and ‘foot’ in seven European languages:

See Table

---

We can formulate a number of hypotheses:

1. The four languages with initial p probably belong to one group and the three with initial f to another, since such coincidences cannot be the result of pure chance.
2. All the languages in the first group derive from the same mother tongue with an initial p for these words, and those in the second group come from another mother tongue with initial f.
3. By comparison with languages such as Russian, Persian, Irish, Greek, etc., linguists have managed, after long and painstaking research, to establish new groupings which have, in turn, led to the idea that all of these languages are related. In this way, they have been able to reconstruct a common ancestor for many European languages, an ancestor which they have called Indo-European.

---

THE AGE OF THE GAULS

Gaulish, a mysterious language

Whereas the stages that Latin passed through to become French can be reconstituted through the use of a large number of documents, Gaulish, in spite of Astérix, remains largely mysterious to us. We should add that little was known of the Gauls themselves before the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵ Until that time, the history of France began in the fifth century AD with Clovis, king of the Franks, and not six centuries earlier with Vercingetorix, chief of the Gauls, or ten millennia before that with the inhabitants of the Lascaux caves, or with the hardy mammoth hunters who had already begun, forty thousand years earlier, to conceive of an afterlife and of whom nothing remains but their burial grounds, or even, of course, with the first traces on French soil of the hominid who was such a skilful flint cutter and who settled at Chilhac in the heart of the Massif Central almost two million years ago.⁶

But let us not linger on such a distant past. Let us rather come back to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Graphic Conventions
• Introduction
• 1 Where Does French Come From?
• 2 Dialects and Patois
• 3 French in France
• 4 French Outside France
• 5 What is French?
• 6 Where is French Going?
• References