10.3.1 History of Norman language

When Norse invaders arrived in the then province of Neustria and settled the land which became known as Normandy, they adopted the Gallo-Romance speech of the existing populations — much as Norman rulers later adopted in England the speech of the administered people. However in both cases the élites contributed elements of their own language to the newly-enriched languages that developed in the territories.

In Normandy, the new Norman language inherited vocabulary from Norse. The influence on phonology is more disputed, although it is argued that the retention of aspirated /h/ and /k/ in Norman is due to Norse influence. Examples of Norman words of Norse origin you can see in appendix №9.

In some cases, Norse words adopted in Norman have been borrowed into French - and more recently some of the English words used in French can be traced back to Norman origins.

Following the Norman conquest of 1066, the Norman language spoken by the new rulers of England left traces of specifically Norman words which can be distinguished from the equivalent lexical items in French (see app.10).

Other words such as captain, kennel, cattle and canvas introduced from Norman exemplify how Norman retained a /k/ from Latin that was not retained in French.

There is also some influence from the Breton language, perhaps via Gallo. That is because Gallo is spoken on the border of Normandy and Brittany, south of Mont Saint-Michel and was the language (at least, an earlier form) spoken in the March of Neustria.

Norman immigrants to North America, also introduced many "Normanisms" to Quebec French and French in Canada generally. Joual, a working class sociolect of Quebec particularly exhibits strong Norman influence.

10.4 Norman French

A legacy of the Roman Empire was the fact that the area west of the Rhine spoke Latin. The Latin they spoke, however, was not the highly inflected Classical Latin, used by the church and scholars, but the common, or Vulgar Latin of the soldiers and the market place. This Vulgar Latin, as it had no one controlling or regulating its use, brought in words from the languages of the local populace. For this reason Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese and French, though similar, even by 1066 were not the same.

French had brought in many words from the Gauls who originally occupied the land. In addition they had suffered conquest and settlement from various Germanic Tribes such as the Goths and Vandals, and finally the Franks, who gave the country its new name. From these peoples came additional words.

There were two major divisions in French: langue d'oil in the north; langue d'oc in the south (oil and oc being variations of 'yes'). Langue d'oc was nearer to Catalan than it was to Langue d'oil.

Langue d'oil had three major dialects, namely those of Picardy, Ile de Paris and Norman. The Northmen (Danes and some Norwegians) who had taken the land and settled there influenced Norman French. Its proximity to England had also allowed some English words to slip in, noticeably nautical terms.