Ashley Barnes, age 16, of Lowell, Mass. , for her question:
HOW DID THE FRENCH LANGUAGE ORIGINATE?
French is one of the Romance languages. It developed from Latin when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, now France, in the 50s B.C. The Gauls gradually adopted the language of the Roman soldiers, but tended to change vocabulary on the basis of the way the words sounded.
The conglomerate language that actually developed kept only about 360 of the old Gaulish words.
When the Franks invaded Gaul during 400s A.D., they gave their name to the country and also contributed about 1,000 words to the language. Norsemen occupied northern France in the 800s and added 900 of their words to the language. Some additional words also came from the Greeks.
As the language developed, the grammar changed. By the 700s, popular Latin had evolved so completely into the language that few persons could read it without the aid of a dictionary.
By the 900s, two distinct dialects of Old French were spoken in the north and south. But the dialect of the language spoken in the area around Paris eventually became the accepted tongue throughout France.
In the Renaissance Era scholarly Greek and Latin words were added to the French vocabulary, and contacts with the Spaniards and
Italians in the 1500s brought still additional words. By the 1700s, writers and scholars had standardized the structure of French. Today, it is considered one of the clearest and most precise of all languages.
Today more than 80 million people speak French as their mother tongue, and millions of others use it as a second language.
French is the official language of France, of course, but it is also an official language in Belgium, Canada, Haiti, Luxembourg, Switzerland and at the United Nations.
French has served for hundreds of years as the language of diplomats. Its clear style and regular syntax, or arrangement of words, makes it ideal for legal, diplomatic and business use.
Experts consider French to be a beautiful and harmonious language. About half the words in English derive from French. English began to absorb French words after the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
Thousands of French terms have been adopted, either in whole or in part, into English.
Pronunciation of French is often difficult for English speaking people. The French rarely pronounce final consonants except for the letters C, F, L and R. Nasal sounds occur in syllables ending in N or M. And the French R, pronounced with the uvula at the back of the soft palate, sounds throatier than the English R.