The Story of French (6 page)

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.

Until the sixteenth century French had spread because, in many ways, it was the language of power. But in the sixteenth century this relationship changed, or rather, it was updated. A new kind of king decided to put French to work, not just to expand his own power, but also to build a state. In doing so he made French the official language of the largest and most powerful country in Europe. And he created a relationship between the French State and language that has lasted to this day.

Chapter 2 ~

In French and Not Otherwise

François I was a radical departure from the two meek and unimposing kings who had preceded him. Almost two metres tall, a bon vivant and an excellent hunter, he was crowned King of France in 1515, at the age of twenty. His reign began like a crack of thunder, with a military victory against the “invincible” Swiss mercenaries in Marignano, Italy. While he inaugurated the modern age of warfare by using artillery, François still led his charging cavalry like a medieval king, and even had himself knighted on the battlefield after the victory. This mixture of chivalric values and modern ideas sparked in Europe a fascination with and admiration for French kings that would last until the French Revolution.

François’s reputation also spread thanks to his penchant for sumptuous feasts, but even more important was his Court, which he filled with
lettrés,
poets and artists. He was a great lover of the arts, one of the greatest France has ever known, easily on a par with Saint-Louis (IX) and Louis XIV. Greatly inspired by the Italian Renaissance, throughout his reign he was bent on modernizing France and making it a haven of sophistication and refinement. His contribution to the French language was enormous. François I was the first French king to link language specifically with the State, a relationship that remains one of the most striking features of French to this day. And, perhaps more important, François’s cultural policies helped France—and the French language—gradually dispense with Latin once and for all. We visited one of the Renaissance castles that François I built in Villers-Cotterêts, now a sleepy industrial town 80 kilometres north of Paris. The castle was transformed into a retirement home decades ago and, unlike other famous castles François built in the Loire Valley, this one looks rather shabby today. Weeds litter the courtyard and one wing is entirely boarded up. The town of Villers-Cotterêts does its best to honour the memory of writer Alexandre Dumas, author of
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte Cristo,
who was born here. But any advertising of the significance of the castle is left to a small plaque at its entrance.