Old French

Old French refers to the Oïl languages as a collective name for the varieties of Romance languages spoken in the northern half of France as well as in parts of Belgium from the 9th to about the end of the 14th century. Old French was replaced by Middle French.

The first reference to the use of a Romance vernacular in France is found in 813 in a resolution of the Council of Tours, in which the bishops are enjoined to teach the fundamentals of the Catholic faith by means of homilies which are intelligible to all. "And let him (the bishop) strive to render the same homilies each intelligible in itself into the vernacular Romance or German, that all may the more easily understand what is said." - Et ut easdem omelias quisque aperte transferre studeat in rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam, quo facilius cuncti possint intellegere quae dicuntur. This distinguishes liturgical Latin, which is oriented towards scriptural usage and grammatical rules, from the 'rustic' vernacular languages Romansh and German (rustica lingua romana and thiotisca, respectively), which have not yet been subjected to such rules.

The first Old French language document is the Strasbourg Oaths of 842, in which Charles the Bald and Louis the German conspired against the first-born brother Lothar after the death of his father Louis the Pious. In the Latin text handed down by Nithard, the oaths, which the brothers and their followers took in their respective vernacular languages 'Romance' ('romana lingua') and Old High German ('teudisca lingua'), are quoted in detail. The Romance part reproduces a text still very close to Vulgar Latin, but already French, in a conservative Latinizing spelling oriented to the Latin of the royal chanceries, with some pure Latin words (excerpt):

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa...

This shows that a Romance vernacular was already spoken in the western Frankish Empire (Francia occidentalis) in Carolingian times. It was necessary to use it in the legal act of swearing an oath, so that even those who were not sufficiently familiar with written Latin knew whose content the oath was.

Old French is the first Romance language ever documented in written records. The first Old French poetry is the Eulalia sequence (ca. 884), which shows characteristics of the Picardy dialect; it is followed by further religious poetry and ecclesiastical texts (Jonas fragment). With the beginning of the Capetian dynasty in 987, the language, which was influenced by the French dialect, gradually spread in France. In the 12th century, the written tradition of the heroic poetry, the chanson de geste, which was intended to be performed by minstrels but was older in origin, began, to which the songs of the trouvères, the courtly romances of chivalry and antiquity, historical poetry and French adaptations of biblical texts and didactic works were soon added. From the end of the 12th century, French was also used as the language of documents, initially mainly in private documents, and from the middle of the 13th century, alongside Latin, also in documents of the royal chancellery.

Phonology

Vowel system

The Old French vowel system goes back first to the replacement of the Latin vowel lengths by qualities, which occurred after the collapse of quantities in the 3rd century.

Subsequently, mainly vowels in free position (i.e. at the end of the syllable) were diphthongized, i.e. double vowels developed from single vowels, very early e.g. the diphthong /ou/ develops from /o/ (in louer, cour), likewise the nasalization of /an/ and /on/ develops, likewise diphthongs could be spoken nasally like /aim/, /ain/.

Consonants

Almost all consonants (and i) before vowels were palatalized in Old French, i.e. the pronunciation shifted towards the palatum (front palate). The /d/ formed from the intervocalic /t/ becomes an "English" voiced th (/ð/) in Old French before this sound disappears completely from the French language (e.g. Latin vita > Old French vida (c. 980) > vithe /viðə/ (1050) > vie).

Graph

In Old French texts (as in New French) the graphy differs considerably from the pronunciation, i.e. it is written partly etymologizing, partly phonetically. The actual pronunciation can be reconstructed in concrete cases from rhymes such as forest : plaist; fais : apres or by examining the word borrowings in other languages, e.g. forest Middle High German: foreht; Old French: chastel, Middle High German: tschastel or also English change, chapel, chief. In Old French, the c before e and i, palatalized as /ts/, and the c before a, o and u, still realized as /k/, were not distinguished in spelling; the cedilla to mark the palatalized pronunciation of c before a, o and u was introduced only in the 16th century by printing.