Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 44, The Romance of Old French.

In this episode, we're going to explore the development of Old French, from the Latin

spoken by the Romans.

Other with Old English and Old Norse, French was one of the three fundamental components

of Middle English.

So those three languages came together to produce the language of Jeffrey Chaucer, and

eventually the language of Shakespeare.

Over the last few episodes, we've explored the history of the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians

up to the point of the Viking invasions.

This time, I want to focus on the third part of that story, the Franks and the early history

of their French language.

Even though this is a podcast about the history of English, I think it's important to digress

at this point to explore the development of French.

And this part of the story is important for several reasons.

As we know, the later Norman Conquest brought a lot of French words into English.

Nearly half of the words in normal, conversational English come from French.

This influence makes English the most Latin of all the Germanic languages.

So that alone should justify our look at the early history of French.

But French also affected the pronunciation of certain words in English, and it even affected

the grammar of English, and it heavily impacted the spelling of English words.

So because of that extensive influence, it's important to understand the origins of French.

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