Frankish

Frankish was the language of the Franks, a loose confederation of Germanic tribes that coalesced along the lower Rhine in the third century CE. Never a unified literary language and largely unwritten, it belongs to the Franconian branch of West Germanic, closely related to Old Saxon and more distantly to Old English. What scholars know of it comes almost entirely through loanwords preserved in Old French, through personal names and place names in Latin chronicles, and through a handful of glosses and marginalia. It was a warrior tongue, dense with vocabulary for horses, blades, feudal rank, and the administration of conquered land.

When Clovis I united the Frankish tribes and swept through Roman Gaul between 486 and 511 CE, Frankish became the prestige language of a conquering aristocracy ruling a majority Latin-speaking population. The tension was productive and irreversible. Latin remained the medium of the church, the law, and all written record-keeping; Frankish remained the language of the Merovingian court, the army, and the great landholding families. Over the next two centuries, hundreds of Frankish words poured into the emerging Gallo-Romance vernacular, words for war, agriculture, feudal property, and social hierarchy. The conquered language absorbed the conqueror's vocabulary wholesale.

The Carolingian period, roughly 750 to 843 CE, represents both the apex and the twilight of Frankish. Charlemagne spoke it as his native tongue, reportedly gave Frankish names to the months and the winds, and commissioned collections of old Frankish heroic songs, though none survive. Yet the very Carolingian Renaissance he sponsored accelerated Latin literacy and, paradoxically, hastened the absorption of Frankish into the emerging vernaculars. The Strasbourg Oaths of 842 CE, sworn by Charlemagne's grandsons Louis the German and Charles the Bald, are recorded in something already recognizably early Old French on one side and early Old High German on the other. Frankish as a distinct entity was dissolving before the ink dried.

The Treaty of Verdun in 843 CE split the Carolingian Empire and sealed the linguistic fate of Frankish. In the west, the descendants of Frankish speakers were fully Romance-speaking within another generation, their Frankish vocabulary merged invisibly into what became Old French. In the east and northeast, Frankish dialects evolved into Old Low Franconian, the direct ancestor of Dutch and Flemish, and into Middle Franconian, ancestor of Luxembourgish. The name France itself is the Franks' bequest to history: a people whose spoken language officially vanished around 900 CE, leaving fingerprints on two modern national languages and the name of a nation of sixty-eight million people.