Middle French
| Middle French | |
|---|---|
| françois, franceis | |
| Region | France |
| Era | evolved into Modern French by the early 17th century |
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Indo-European
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Early form
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | midd1316 |
Middle French (French: moyen français) is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from the 14th to the early 17th centuries. It is a period of transition during which:
The most important change found in Middle French is the complete disappearance of the noun declension system (already underway for centuries). There is no longer a distinction between nominative and oblique forms of nouns, and plurals are indicated simply with an s. This transformation necessitates an increased reliance on the order of words in the sentence, which becomes more or less the syntax of modern French (although there is a continued reliance on the verb in the second position of a sentence, or "verb-second structure", until the 16th century).
Among the elites, Latin was still the language of education, administration, and bureaucracy; this changed in 1539, with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, in which François I made French alone the language for legal and juridical acts. Regional differences were still extremely pronounced throughout France: In the south of France, Occitan languages dominated; in east central France, Franco-Provençal languages were predominant; while, in the north of France, Oïl languages other than Francien continued to be spoken. The administrative language imposed in 1539 is generally thought by modern linguists to represent a generalised langue d'oïl shorn of distinctive dialectal features, rather than the triumph of one dialect over the others.
The fascination with classical texts led to numerous borrowings from Latin and Greek, sometimes to the detriment of the rich Old French vocabulary. Numerous neologisms based on Latin roots were introduced, and some scholars modified the spelling of French words to bring them into conformity with their Latin roots, sometimes erroneously. This often produced a radical difference between a word's spelling and the way it was pronounced.
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