II.

Origins

The Gauls, a Celtic people, were the earliest inhabitants of Gaul, or present-day France; they spoke a Celtic language, from which Irish, Welsh, Breton, and other modern Celtic languages were derived. Celtic gave way, after the conquest of Gaul in the 1st century bc by the Roman general Gaius Julius Caesar, to the form of Latin used by the uneducated classes in Rome and known as the lingua vulgaris in contrast to the sermo urbanus that was used by writers and orators. By the end of the 4th century ad Latin had entirely replaced Celtic in Gaul. The Celtic tongue spoken in the modern French region of Brittany is not a survival of the pre-Roman native culture; it is believed to have been brought there by Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles who took refuge in Brittany from the invasions of Britain by the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons in the 5th to the 7th century ad. Several words of purely Celtic origin, about 50 in all, have passed into modern French, including Celtic-Latin, alauda, modern French, alouette (“lark”); and Celtic, carruca, Celtic-Latin, carrus, modern French, char (“car”).

The lingua vulgaris was so firmly established in Gaul that the succeeding conquerors of the country, the German tribes, Visigoths, Burgundians, and Franks, did not impose their language upon the conquered territory; instead they adopted the language that they found there. In modern French only about 400 words are of Germanic origin, for example, franc (“honest”, “frank”) and français (“French”), both from the Germanic word Franko (“freeman”); fauteuil (“armchair”) from the Germanic faldastol; and auberge (“inn”), from the Germanic heriberga. Greek words were also introduced into the lingua vulgaris at various times, beginning in the 6th century, through Greek colonies along the Mediterranean Sea, notably those at Marseille and Nice. By the 7th century the lingua vulgaris had been greatly modified by the people of France; the language spoken by them at that time was known as the Roman, or Romanic, language and was spoken by the upper classes as well as common people. As early as the 6th century, the homilies of the Church councils that took place in France were translated into Romanic, and in the 8th century the Frankish leader Charlemagne by royal edict ordered Church dignitaries to deliver their sermons in the popular tongue.