The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  Like all other Romance vernaculars, Anglo-Norman evolved quickly. At first William’s companions were mostly imported from Normandy and Maine, but as the years passed, Picards and Franks (as they called Parisians back then) were also brought to the English court. The English language is an excellent laboratory for examining the different trends that were at work in the formation of French. For the word château, the Norman variant castel produced castle, whereas the Paris variant chastel produced chastelain and châtelaine. There are many other examples; for example, chasser (to hunt), which was pronounced chacier around Paris, but cachier in Normandy, produced chase and catch. Real, royal and regal meant the same thing in Norman, Françoys and Latin respectively, but English took them on and gave them each different meanings. The term real estate comes from two Anglo-Norman terms. Leal, loyal and legal followed the same pattern, although leal (meaning both “loyal” and “legal”) has fallen out of use. Warranty and guarantee are the same word, pronounced with a Norman and a Françoys accent respectively; this difference in pronunciation also explains how Guillaume became William, guerre became war, and Gaul became Walloon.

  English became the expression of a profound brand of nationalism long before French did. As early as the thirteenth century, the English were struggling to define their nation in opposition to the French, a phenomenon that is no doubt the root of the peculiar mixture of attraction and repulsion most anglophones feel towards the French today, whether they admit it or not. When Norman kings tried to add their French territory to England and unify their kingdom under the English Crown, the French of course resisted. The situation led to the first, lesser-known Hundred Years War (1159–1299). This long quarrel forced the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to take sides. Those who chose England got closer to the local grassroots, setting the Anglo-Norman aristocracy on the road to assimilation into English. In 1362 the English king went further, with the Statute of Pleadings, which forbade Anglo-Norman and declared English the only legal language in the kingdom—this was a century before the French made any such proclamation about their own language. Curiously, the Anglo-Norman judicial jargon known as Law French persisted until the eighteenth century. As well, the motto of the British Crown (Dieu et mon droit) and of the Order of the Garter (Honi soit qui mal y pense) are two heraldic vestiges of the period when the English Crown was French.

  In spite of this estrangement, French remained the language of intellectuals and gentlemen for a long time, even in the English colonies. Some words are a testimony to that; gentil was borrowed three times as gentle (thirteenth century), genteel (sixteenth century) and jaunty (seventeenth century). Chaucer chose to tell his Canterbury Tales in English, but 150 years later Thomas More published his Utopia in Latin with a French translation; the English version appeared only after his death. The link between French and English remains strong to this day: Fourteen million British people visit France every year (only three million French travel to Great Britain). Statistics on second-language teaching show that French is doing consistently well in English-language countries (see table 4 and 6 in Appendix). And the number of borrowings from French into English remains considerable; entrée, faux and garage are recent acquisitions that nobody blinks at.

  For anglophones, French remains the language of chic, taste and superiority to this day; as a mark of the love/hate relationship English-speakers tend to have with French, French can represent these qualities in a positive or a negative sense. The best-known example is the Harry Potter series. Author J. K. Rowling, who studied French at Exeter University, gave her nasty aristocratic characters names that are clearly inspired by Old French or that have a French etymology: Malfoy (bad faith), Voldemort (flight of death), Lestrange (stranger). William the Conqueror would probably never have believed that his victory would influence the semantics of English for ten centuries.

  Back in France, the langues d’oïl were about to win a centuries-old Darwinian struggle with the langues d’oc. The victory owed much to the rising power of Paris and the Franks, but it was far from predictable. The Frankish ruler Charlemagne’s vast empire of a century earlier had not survived his sons’ rivalries and the Norsemen’s invasion. By the tenth century, French territory was a broken patchwork of principalities. The king of the Franks, who was established in Paris, was theoretically the greatest lord among many others and the ultimate arbiter of justice, but, in fact, his “inferiors”—the lords who ran Flanders, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Toulouse, Brittany and Anjou—were more powerful, and fiercely independent. They had their own armies, currencies and justice systems, and they answered to no one. Things were so bad that by 987 the Kingdom of the Franks had run out of successors. So they crowned one Hugues Capet, a Frank, though he did not speak German; in doing so, they broke with a tradition that dated back to Clovis.

  Capet and his successors, the Capetians, played the game of alliances, marriages and war so well that over the next four centuries they enlarged their domain and re-established the precedence of royal justice over that of other lords and the Church. The Franks’ power grew, and no one raised an eyebrow when Philippe Augustus (ruled 1180–1223) opened his reign by declaring himself King of France rather than merely King of the Franks—though the significance of his declaration was not yet clear.

  It was Philippe Augustus who delivered the death blow to the langues d’oc, bringing about their swift decline. The langues d’oc had still been surfing on the popularity of the troubadours, but the wind shifted in 1209, when Pope Innocent III preached a crusade against the Albigensians, a heretic sect based around Carcassonne, whose influence was spreading in southwestern France. It was the first crusade outside the Holy Land. Philippe saw the attack on the Albigensians as a great opportunity to flex his muscles and subdue his vassals, so he offered to help the Pope wipe them out. Much of Toulouse’s wealth was destroyed in the process, and the troubadours moved to Spain. The langue d’oc lost its lustre almost overnight and became frozen into a set of dialects, which it remains to this day.

  Philippe Augustus grabbed half the territory of present-day France during his reign and appointed civil servants from Paris to impose his authority everywhere. These literate bourgeois spoke the language that came to be associated with true power: Françoys. What makes this period confusing in the history of French is that labels such as France, Frank and Françoys did not then have clear meanings, and were often used interchangeably with other terms. Before the first millennium, Françoys was associated strictly with the Franks who held power in Paris. Since these Franks spoke a northern dialect of Romance, all langues d’oïl dialects came to be called Françoys. By the twelfth century the term françoys also referred to a manner of writing and speaking that was unique to the Paris region. By the fourteenth century Françoys referred to a defined language, distinct from all the other langues d’oïl; it took another three centuries for Françoys to be spelled Français.

  By the fourteenth century Françoys was so well-established that neither the Black Death, which killed a good third of the population of France, nor the second Hundred Years War, which almost annihilated the French Crown, could make a dent in its influence. It was during this century that Marco Polo dictated the first account of his voyages, Devisement du monde—in French rather than Italian.

  How exactly did Françoys emerge? In the nineteenth century the French linguist Gaston Paris popularized the idea that Françoys was derived from the dialect of Paris; he called it Francien. He believed that this language had taken precedence over all the other Romance dialects because it was the language of the king, and that it had evolved straight into French. It was a seductive theory, taught by generations of linguists, but it turned out to be only half true. In fact, there is no proof that a Francien dialect ever existed.

  But there is some truth to Gaston’s Paris theory. Paris produced a scripta, that is, a writing system, developed to help speakers of the various dialects in the king’s domain understand each other. Paris was at the crossroads of four important langues d�
��oïl idioms: Norman, Picard, Champenois and Orléanais. All of these dialects were mutually intelligible, but over time the speakers simply fused the distinctions into a single interregional dialect called Françoys, which became Français as the accent changed. By the twelfth century, writers from the regions around Paris—Picardy, Wallonie, Normandy, Champagne and Orléans—were making a conscious effort to eliminate dialectal characteristics in their writing so they could be understood by a larger number of people. However, regional influences did not disappear all at once. For example, Béroul’s Tristan et Iseut (Tristan and Isolde) was the work of a Norman-speaking trouvère (a troubadour of the north), whereas Chrétien de Troyes’s Romans de la table ronde (Stories of the Round Table) clearly shows accents of Champagne. Yet their writing shows they purposefully blurred dialectal differences. It was not the last time in the history of French that a group of writers would take the lead in hammering out the language.

  According to the French lexicographer Alain Rey, by the twelfth century this scripta—which Gaston Paris called Francien— already existed in an oral form among the lettrés (men and women of letters). But Francien took much longer to become a mother tongue. Somewhere between the beginning and the end of the second Hundred Years War (1337–1453), a significant part of the urban population of Paris had acquired a sort of common language they called Françoys, and each generation was transmitting more of this tongue to its children. Year after year its vocabulary widened beyond words for trade and domestic life. After millions of informal exchanges at all levels of society over centuries, this scripta finally became a common mother tongue.

  At the beginning of our research, Jean-Benoît travelled to the island of Jersey, a mere sixteen kilometres off the coast of Normandy in the English Channel. The island is a kind of pastoral dreamscape, with small trails criss-crossing a beautifully unassuming countryside of green vales, medieval castles and Celtic stone monuments. At low tide its surface area extends to a grand total of fourteen by ten kilometres. A dependency of the British Crown, Jersey is a tax haven that harbours five times more foreign capital than Monaco. Like Monaco, it won this role thanks to a combination of handy location, beautiful scenery and unusual historical circumstances. Amazingly, over the centuries this tiny island has managed to retain its autonomy: it’s not even considered a part of the European Union. It has managed to hold on to an ancient Anglo-Norman law system that dates back a thousand years, and that financiers and the wealthy find particularly well adapted for sheltering their money.

  But Jean-Benoît was there to see—actually, to hear—another remarkable historical relic: the Jèrriais language. The island’s English-speaking majority today calls it “Norman French.” To an untrained ear, the language sounds like mispronounced French, but it is effectively a tongue of its own, one of the last surviving examples of the old Norman dialect—one of the source languages of French—that was exported to England in the eleventh century. Jèrriais has its own phonetics, syntax and lexicon. One of its most striking features is its use of the th sound, which is common in English but nonexistent in standard French. For words such as father, mother and brother, Jèrriais speakers say paithe, maithe and fraithe, rather than the French père, mère and frère.

  Jean-Benoît spent three days with Geraint Jennings, a member of the Société Jèrriaise, an organization dedicated to preserving the language. Geraint spoke in Jèrriais and Jean-Benoît answered in Québécois French—probably much the way such conversations took place between speakers of different dialects around Paris seven centuries ago. In fact, roughly three-quarters of the vocabulary and grammar of French and Jèrriais overlap, which gives the two languages more in common than there is between French and Haitian Creole, for example. For a francophone with a good ear and tolerance for variation, most of the conversation was intelligible, although Jean-Benoît had to ask a few tchestions (questions) to clear up some possible méprînses (méprises, misunderstandings). Geraint showed Jean-Benoît the island and introduced him to mayors, farmers, business people and church singers. After three days of this Jean-Benoît hardly needed any aîgue (aide, help) to find his c’mîn (chemin, way) through Jèrriais grammar and vocabulary.

  Nowadays Norman is spoken in only three other places: the nearby island of Guernsey and the Contentin Peninsula and Pays de Caux (near Fécamp) in Normandy. In Jersey and Guernsey it is spoken with an English accent, in France with a French accent. Only 2,764 speakers of Jèrriais are left in Jersey, or less than three percent of the island’s population—and only 110 use it on a daily basis. As a result, Jèrriais is confined to a primarily rural area around the parishes of St. Ouen and St. Martin, although it is possible to hear it spoken at the market in the capital of St. Helier. By a process that is well-known to sociolinguists, the speakers of the language have sheltered themselves by confining their language to rural traditions, the same process that enabled Cajuns living in rural Louisiana to hold on to their French. This is why Jèrriais is best used for discussions about vâques (vaches, cows), pouaîssons (poissons, fish) and chevrettes (crevettes, shrimp).

  Until about a century ago Jèrriais was still part of the modern world, but the language has simply not kept up with the times. Geraint Jennings is conscious that Jèrriais’s days may be numbered, and he is working hard to adapt the language to modern realities. As maître-paître (webmaster) of his association, he took the initiative of pulling the souôthie (souris, mouse) out of its hole and adding it to the vocabulary of computers. These improvements are regarded as controversial in a community that has survived because it has let the world pass it by.

  Northern Romance dialects, or langues d’oïl, fused into Françoys through meetings such as Jean-Benoît’s in Jersey, where people “traded” pronunciations and grammar. From studying poetry, linguists can tell that Françoys had developed its particular sound by the beginning of the fifteenth century—emphasis was disappearing from words or moving to the ends of words or sentences. The Latin system of cases had all but disappeared, and the sentence had taken on its standard order of subject-verb-object. The S and Z had changed functions—instead of marking the subject and object cases, they were used interchangeably to indicate the plural. The final E indicated the feminine gender in writing. And French had a complete set of articles (le, la, un, une), pronouns (le mien, le tien), possessive articles (mon, ton, son) and demonstratives (ceci, cela, ce, cette). The French language also began to distinguish between the informal form of “you”—tu—and the formal vous—which is called tutoiement and vouvoiement (tu-saying and vous-saying). Old diphthongs and triphthongs such as au and eau, whose vowels all used to be pronounced, were already fusing into a single O sound. And people were beginning to use inversion to ask a question, although they still hesitated between veut-il? and veut-y? for “do you want?” They also began to ask questions using the phrase est-ce que (equivalent to the English “does” or “do” in questions).

  The spelling of French evolved dramatically during this period. Only Latin had a clear written code at the time, and the business of expressing vernacular sounds in writing was very new. This was not easy in the case of French, which used only the twenty-three letters of classical Latin (no J, U or W) to reproduce about forty sounds. The pronunciation of about twenty consonants and twenty vowels differed from one period to another and from one place to another. Until the twelfth century the writing of French had been very phonetic. In such a system, vit could mean either “eight” or “he lives,” and vile was either “oil” or “city.” This was fine when only a few people read and wrote and when writing was not vital in day-today life, but that changed as the government and business grew. Suddenly, writing inconsistencies were creating misunderstandings, disputes and litigation.

  This was why the lettrés, primarily notaries and clerks, started introducing unpronounced letters to distinguish words. H was a popular one—they decided to add it to vile and vit, so “oil” and “eight” came to be written hvile and hvit to distinguish them from vile
(city) and vit (he lives). Latin etymology was an important source of new letters. That’s why a G was added to doi and vint, which became doigt (finger), from digitus and vingt (twenty) from viginti. Since chan could mean “field” or “song,” it became champ (field), in imitation of the Latin campus, and chant (song), in imitation of cantus. This re-Latinization of French was partly the product of the snobbery of clerks, notaries and scholars, who thought that by adding Latin letters to French they would give it more dignity. However, they were not very coherent or consistent about it. To distinguish the number six from si (if), they added an X to make six, which conformed to the Latin sex. While they were at it, they added an X to di (ten), although this had no relation to the Latin decem. Some of these changes affected the pronunciation of words—such as six and dix, now pronounced with an S sound at the end to render the X, whereas before they used to be pronounced see and dee (linguists call this process orthographism).

  Linguists know that by 1265 people were speaking Françoys in the modern sense. The language by this time was distinct from the dialects that had formed it, and it was a mother tongue being transmitted to children as they grew up, not a mere lingua franca. Françoys by this time was also regarded as superior to the other dialects, both socially and politically. That’s one reason why the German aristocracy began learning Françoys in the fourteenth century. However, the spread of this new dialect did not mean the end of the other dialects. Picard, Norman, Champenois and Orléanais continued to be widely used for a couple more centuries before they began to wane. But like Occitan, the dialects were progressively relegated to the status of patois as their social status eroded, until—as with Jèrriais—their vocabulary stopped keeping up with the times.