FRENCH - A ROMANCE LANGUAGE

The Romance languages comprise of all those languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of soldiers, settlers and slaves of the Roman Empire, which was substantially different from the Classical Latin of the Roman upper strata.

French is a Romance language spoken originally in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Linguistically, the development of Old French from Vulgar Latin is distinguished by complex phonetic transformations and a simplification of the Latin case system.

When ancient Gaul (now modern France) was conquered by the Romans in 59 BC, its inhabitants spoke Gaulish, which was affected by the Latin of the Roman overlords. In the 5th cent. A.D. the Franks, a group of Germanic tribes, began their invasion of Gaul, but they too were Romanized. Although modern French thus inherited several hundred words of Celtic origin and several hundred more from Germanic, it owes its structure and the greater part of its vocabulary to Latin.
The period from 9th to 13th century is marked by Old French. French from the 14th to 16th century is refered as Middle French. During this period many words and expressions were borrowed from Latin, Greek, and Italian, and a group of French poets, the Pléiade , were reponsible for the development of French. The modern period of French began in the 17th cent. The vocabulary and style of Modern French have been influenced by movements such as romanticism and realism and the present day French is an amalgamation of the richness of the French development.