Who was the first person to speak French?

Answer 1

French is known as a Romance language. Contrary to the common inflection, this simply means that French derives much of its structure from Latin (Romance meaning in a Roman fashion).

Latin contributes the most to the French language. Another major influence was the habitation of the Franks (from which France gets its name)--the Franks were Germanic, so this resulted in changes in the language (especially in northern France). Other local derivations have also come about through the natural evolution of language and the spread of French to other parts of the world.

Answer 2

Nobody 'discovered' French language. It just evolved from Latin (mostly) and others influences, like Germanic languages. The oath of Strasbourg, in 743, is said to be the first text written in French, although no French speaker would understand it nowadays.

Answer 3

First the French language had to develop and then it had to spread throughout France.

(1) Development of French: Language goes through numerous intermediate stages that are only different from one another in slight ways but become incomprehensible to each other centuries later. We have documents and petroglyphs in Paris and its environs that show the slow change from Proper Latin to Gallic Latin variants to Older versions of French (such as those spoken by the Normans in 1066) to modern French. A modern speaker of French would probably be able to go back to the 1200s or 1300s in Paris and be able to have near fluency with the people of that time. He could probably go back to the 700s or 800s and have a degree of communicativity, but not true fluency (imagine talking to an immigrant who only speaks 500 words of English or so -- how fluid would the conversation be). Beyond that point, the language would be so divergent from Modern French, that the French speaker could guess at meanings, but not well enough to have a proper conversation unless he also spoke Latin and would be able to bridge the gaps.

(2) Expansion from Paris to all of France: Numerous languages developed in the former Roman Empire and France was no exception to this. Other Romance languages that developed in France included: Occitan (also called Langue d'Oc), Burgundian, Provencal, Gascon, Normandian, and dozens more. There are also other languages that developed in France that are not Romance languages like Breton (closer to Gaelic), Alsatian (closer to German), and Basque (unrelated to any extant languages). The French language used today derives from the region of Paris and only extended to other regions of France through Parisian Cultural Imperialism over much of France. Regions in France's center were easier to "Frenchify" since their linguistic differences from Parisian were more nuanced. The Parisianization of their languages happened around 500 years ago. More distant areas, especially those on the periphery of French control and those that spoke non-Romantic languages were the hardest to subject to Parisianization. Some areas of Brittany and Alsace did not become majority-French speaking until the 20th century.

Answer 4

Nobody knows who the first person to speak any language was. Languages develop gradually over hundreds of years.

Answer 5

That is a very interesting question. There isn't anyONE who first spoke it. Languages take hundreds of years to develope.

Answer 6

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