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[3] The French language is a Romance language derived from Latin and heavily influenced principally by Celtic and Frankish. Beginning in the 11th century, literature written in medieval French was one of the oldest vernacular (non-Latin) literatures in western Europe and it became a key source of literary themes in the Middle Ages across the ...
The term Francien is a linguistic neologism coined in the 19th century to name the hypothetical variant of Old French allegedly spoken by the late 14th century in the ancient province of Pays de France—the then Paris region later called Île-de-France. This Francien, it is claimed, became the Medieval French language.
The nature and importance of Francophone literature in various territories of the former French Empire depends on the concentration of French settlers, the length of time spent in colonial status, and how developed indigenous languages were as literary languages. It was only following the Second World War that a distinction started to be made ...
Up to roughly 1340, the Romance languages spoken in the Middle Ages in the northern half of what is today France are collectively known as "ancien français" ("Old French") or "langues d'oïl" (languages where one says "oïl" to mean "yes"); following the Germanic invasions of France in the fifth century, these Northern dialects had developed distinctly different phonetic and syntactical ...
The modern French language does not have a significant stress accent (as English does) or long and short syllables (as Latin does). This means that the French metric line is generally not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables (see syllabic verse; in the Renaissance, there was a brief attempt to develop a French poetics based on long and short syllables [see "musique ...
The regional languages of France are sometimes called patois, but this term (roughly meaning "dialects") is often considered derogatory. Patois is used to refer to essentially oral languages, [ 6 ] even though some have a current and/or historical use, such as Occitan, which was already being written at a time when French was not and its ...
Occitan (English: / ˈ ɒ k s ɪ t ən,-t æ n,-t ɑː n /; [12] [13] Occitan pronunciation: [utsiˈta, uksiˈta]), [a] also known as lenga d'òc (Occitan: [ˈleŋɡɒ ˈðɔ(k)] ⓘ; French: langue d'oc) by its native speakers, sometimes also referred to as Provençal, is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as Spain's Val d'Aran in Catalonia ...
The Regional literature of France, besides literature written in the French language, may include literature written in other languages of France.In the medieval period many of the competing standard languages in various territories that later came to make up the territory of modern France each produced literary traditions, such as Anglo-Norman literature and Provençal literature.