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If 50% of people did not speak French, what did they speak? I am extremely skeptical of this claim (but I haven't looked at your cited sources). I mean, the Fr
by javert 12y ago
If 50% of people did not speak French, what did they speak?
I am extremely skeptical of this claim (but I haven't looked at your cited sources). I mean, the French government worked to unify the language used in the country well before the time you are talking about.
I can't imagine that langue d'oil was actually a different language(s) than "French," and not properly considered to be perhaps French dialects, but maybe I'm wrong.
- umanwizard 12y agoBreton, Gallo, Picard, Walloon, Provençal, Catalan, Alsacien, ... Go talk to some 70+ people in rural parts of France and ask them if they had to learn to speak differently when they went to school or had to start communicating with people in the cities and I'll bet they say yes. Languages other than Standard French were very common even in the 20th century. (By the way, whether something is a "dialect" or a "separate language" is much more of a political question than a scientific one. Speakers of some of the languages I mentioned -- Gallo, Walloon, and Picard are all oïl languages -- may have thought of themselves as speaking uneducated peasant French. But they were more different than, say, Scots and English, and probably not more than superficially mutually intelligible.)