Old Gallo-Romance is a

Romance language The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

spoken from around 600 to 900 AD. It evolved from the

Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Colloquial, Popular, Spoken or Vernacular Latin, is the range of non-formal Register (sociolinguistics), registers of Latin spoken from the Crisis of the Roman Republic, Late Roman Republic onward. ''Vulgar Latin'' a ...

spoken by the Gallo-Romans during the time of

Clovis I Clovis (; reconstructed Old Frankish, Frankish: ; – 27 November 511) was the first List of Frankish kings, king of the Franks to unite all of the Franks under one ruler, changing the form of leadership from a group of petty kings to rule by a ...

's successors belonging to the

Merovingian dynasty The Merovingian dynasty () was the ruling family of the Franks from around the middle of the 5th century until Pepin the Short in 751. They first appear as "Kings of the Franks" in the Roman army of northern Gaul. By 509 they had united all the ...

Characteristics

* Like other Romance languages, Old-Gallo Romance distinguished the masculine and feminine forms. * The noun forms in Old Gallo-Romance were reduced from the Latin six to two, as shown in

Old Occitan Old Occitan (, ), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Old Occitan generally includes Early and Old Occitan. Middle Occitan is some ...

and

Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th [2-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ...

, with the nominative ending being -s. * Old Gallo-Italic appears to have used V2 word order.

Literature

Old Gallo-Romance literature consists of a few texts, with them including the Oaths of Strasbourg (also written in Old High Frankish).''« Moyen Âge : l'affirmation des langues vulgaires »''
in the ''Encyclopædia universalis''.Conference of Claude Hagège at the historical museum of Strasbourg,
(read online)
Texts that precede the Oaths of Strasbourg include the

Kassel Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in North Hesse, northern Hesse, in Central Germany (geography), central Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel (region), Kassel and the d ...

and Reichenau glosses.

Sample text

The following text is

Louis the German Louis the German (German language, German: ''Ludwig der Deutsche''; c. 806/810 – 28 August 876), also known as Louis II of Germany (German language, German: ''Ludwig II. von Deutschland''), was the first king of East Francia, and ruled from 8 ...

's oath in the Oaths of Strasbourg (843), which was sworn in Romance.

References

External links

Old Gallo-Romance corpus
{{Romance languages Languages of Italy Gallo-Romance languages Languages of France Languages of Belgium Languages of Switzerland Extinct Romance languages