cRPG
Off Topic => Historical Discussion => Topic started by: Working_Class on June 23, 2013, 07:16:45 pm
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I've been wondering for awhile now. Is Frankish a language? or did they magically just speak French?
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I believe it was something between latin and modern french. I've read that it was about in the 8th or 9th century when France, Italy etc could be called their own languages, not dialects of latin. I've never studied any of those languages so I'm not an expert on those. And in the eastern parts of the empire that later became HRE, germany etc Germanic languages were used ofc.
The Franks had their own language (?) when they arrive in France, but despite of their ruling position in the society, they were a minority of people there and slowly adapted Latin/French. But maybe some locals know better than me :)
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Probably a lot of dialects, yeah.
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Thats what i figured, but i wasn't sure. I've heard of like "vulgar" Latin or something like that, which compared to "normal" Latin would probably be like modern English to "Ye olde English"
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Yup frankish tribes got settled in roman territory and interbred very early on with romano-gaullish elite families (landowners, governors, military heads, etc). They were a client-tribe of Rome and used as a shield against other intruding germanic tribes. Which is why they addopted christianity (non-arian) so early on compared to other germanic tribes.
You also have to take into account that modern day France was at the time home to various distinct languages/ethnicities, breton/norman/langue d'oil/langue d'oc/arpitan/catalan/basque/etc (even those classifications put several groups together, particularly langues d'oil and langues d'oc which had numerous distinct "flavours" in themselves)...langue d'oil is the one that eventually became known as "french", and some of it's earlier incarnations had traces of germanic language influence, but it was still almost entirely derived from "vulgar latin". Not unlike norman and scandinavian influence in the language, which was negligeable.
edit: Found a ethno/linguistic map of what was considered Gaul in the 8th century (with the addition of Corsica for some reason, probably cause it's considered part of modern day France. Which doesn't explain why they'd add Walloons and Flemish and early Swiss in that case, but whatever):
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Second edit: Afaik the Franks were not one unique tribe with one particular language but a confederation of many different tribes, and it's possible that they addopted the vulgar latin of their subjects as a common lingua franca (haha).