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French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...
The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy.It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE [1] from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time.
Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering vernacular usage or dialects of the Latin language spoken from earliest times in Italy until the latest dialects of the Western Roman Empire, diverging significantly after 500 AD, evolved into the early Romance languages, whose writings began to appear about the 9th century.
Latin a, ā > Proto-Romance /a/ > OF /e/, probably through an intervening stage of /æ/; mare > mer, "sea". That change also characterizes the Gallo-Italic languages of Northern Italy (cf. Bolognese [mɛːr]). Furthermore, all instances of Latin long ū > Proto-Romance /u/ became /y/, the lip-rounded sound that is written u in Modern French ...
With the spread of Western Christianity the Latin alphabet spread to the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Germanic languages, displacing their earlier Runic alphabets, as well as to the speakers of Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, and several (non-Indo-European) Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian.
Mediterranean Gaul (southern France) had become trilingual (Greek, Latin, Gaulish) by the mid-1st century BC. [115] The importance of Latin in gaining access to the ruling power structure caused the rapid extinction of inscriptions in scripts that had been used to represent local languages on the Iberian peninsula and in Gaul.
This eventual spread of Latin can be attributed to the social migration from the focus of urban power to village-centred economies and legal serfdom. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] The Gaulish language likely survived into the sixth century in France despite considerable Romanization . [ 14 ]
Celtic languages spread throughout Central Europe, to central Anatolia, western Iberia, the British Isles and current day France, diverging into Lepontic, Gaulish, Galatian, Celtiberian and Gallaecian. Two Indo-European languages rose to particular prominence in ancient Europe and the surrounding Mediterranean region: Greek and Latin.