An English scholar's Latin reform helped French become a written language
Charlemagne asked the English deacon Alcuin to tidy up Latin in his realm. Alcuin insisted words be pronounced as spelled, which made church sermons baffling to ordinary Romance speakers. Within years priests were told to preach in plain everyday speech, and scribes began inventing ways to write that speech down.
For centuries the everyday Latin of the western empire had been drifting away from the classical kind, with changes visible as early as Plautus. The two stayed mutually intelligible until around the 7th century, when classical Latin stopped being anyone's daily tongue. Even so, people in what is now France kept reading Latin aloud with their own local pronunciation. Alcuin, not a native Romance speaker, prescribed a literal reading of the spelling during the Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th century.
The result was that congregations could no longer follow. In 813 the Third Council of Tours instructed priests to deliver sermons in rustic Roman speech. Because a written page now gave no clue whether it should be voiced as Latin or as the vernacular, writers began devising a separate spelling for the latter; among the earliest attempts are parts of the Oaths of Strasbourg in 842 and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, around 880.
Old French, spoken roughly from the late 8th to the mid-14th century across northern France, was never one uniform language. It was a family of intelligible but varied dialects, the langues d'oïl, set against the langues d'oc of the south. Picard reached so far that it was said to begin at the east door of Notre-Dame in Paris. Burgundian, Walloon and Norman had their own centres, and many survive in modern forms, while Middle French, the ancestor of today's standard, grew from the Île-de-France dialect in the mid-14th century.
Its reach extended well beyond France. Norman-speaking aristocrats brought their dialect to England after the Norman Conquest, which is why so many older French borrowings in English carry a Norman stamp, and it spread into Ireland. During the Crusades it was heard in Sicily, Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a language of nobles and trade.
Source: Old French
