Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

La langue franšaise est une femme. Et cette femme est si belle, si fière, si modeste, si hardie, si touchante, si voluptueuse, si chaste, si noble, si familière, si folle, si sage, qu’ on l’ aime de toute son šme, et qu’ on n’ est jamais tenté de lui ětre infidèle.

The French language is a woman. And that woman is so beautiful, so proud, so modest, so bold, so touching, so voluptuous, so chaste, so noble, so familiar, so mad, so wise, that one loves her with all one’s soul, and is never tempted to be unfaithful to her.

Anatole France, 1844-1924

This quotation, widely known to speakers and lovers of French, is eminently but characteristically self-conscious and self-regarding. [132]The French have taken enthusiastically to the notion that their language has particular virtues, even—and this is curious for such an emotional and ethnocentric idea—that it is more rational than other languages. Perhaps more honestly than others set on global conquests, they came to assert that they were fulfilling a mission civilisatrice which went beyond the making of foreign profits for themselves, and foreign converts for their God.

The outcome, in terms of actual expansion of the language community of native and second-language speakers, what they call la francophonie, [133]has been modest, at least by the standards of its direct competitors (and neighbours): French can now count 77 million native speakers worldwide (two-thirds of them in France itself), and another 51 million second-language speakers. [134]This places it tenth in the list of language populations, effectively the smallest of the major European languages, and less populous even than German, which is hardly spoken at all outside its home continent.

French is by origin the species of Romance spoken in Gaul, which was broadly taken to be the realm of the Franks. Its modern name for itself, franšais [frásέ], comes from the Germanic adjective frankisk , through the Latinisation franciscus. For political and topographical reasons, it came to be typified and led by the dialect of the Ile-de-France region in the north-east. The Ile-de-France has many navigable rivers heading in different directions, hence is a natural crossroads. And so it was a place where speakers of many dialects met, and differences were levelled out. What is more, from the time of Clovis (late fifth century) it mostly had the royal court of the Franks somewhere within it. Different cities flourished and waned, but by the thirteenth century the city of Paris evidently enjoyed a particular cachet; a poet wrote:

Si m’ escuse de mon langage Excuse my language,

Rude, malostru et sauvage rude, ungainly and wild,

Car nés ne sui pas de Paris. for I am not a native of Paris. [604]

A milestone in the early history of 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. [605]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. [606]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]. [135]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. [607]

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. [136]

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 out the twelfth century. Nevertheless, the language communities did not long survive the Muslim reconquests in the thirteenth. One long-term effect, though, was to create a special association of ‘the Frank’ with the idea of a European at large in the East—seen in the widespread Arab term for a European, feringī , and the still useful term lingua franca , denoting an unofficial language of wider communication, which was first used in the Levant. [137]

The Parisian standard for French spread to neighbouring countries before the French state started its serious efforts to spread its power and language abroad. Neither Belgium nor Switzerland, whose boundaries have always included Romance speakers as long as both the boundaries and the language have existed, ever attempted to set up a competing national standard. Geneva had its own distinct Romance dialect, Savoyard, but has used French for official business since the thirteenth century; it was the effective capital of the French Protestants during the wars of the Reformation. Farther south are Savoy, Nice and Monaco. They all had historic links across the Alps, and long resisted becoming part of metropolitan France. But they have largely accepted its language.