The Frankish Language

When they journeyed out of Germania, Franks were speaking their national language, or 'Frank', which is called 'francique' or 'francisque' in current French. The Frankish language also is termed, theotisk or tudesque as Franks are a people which belongs to the large family of Germans, or Germanic peoples, which are often termed too like Teutons or Tudesques. Teutons or Tudesques, more specifically are the Germanic tribes which had settlend in modern days Germany during the times of the Germanic migrations, from Scandinavia, until in the 3rd century A.D. Those tribes were living from the Rhine to the Vistule rivers and the junction of the Morova with the Danube rivers and from North and Baltic seas in the North, down to about current Italy. A part of those Germans only had remained in Scandinavia, like Goths, Sueces and other people. The Germanic peoples, in Scandinavia all were speaking a unique language as it came to divide into two branches, when a part of the tribes migrated southwards! As the Franks had became augmented with other, smaller people, like the Sicambers and had formed a confederation, they passed into Gauls and settled there as a part of them, the Ripuarian Franks had kept remaining along the original Frankland, in a region about the Rhine, in the surroundings of Köln, Mainz and Frankfurt. Franks had brought their language with them and, at least until the beginnings of the Capetian kings, by the 9th century, the Frankish kings, lords, warriors and freemen kept speaking that language. Still under Charlemagne, a monk, Otfride, who was a disciple of Rabanus Maurus, is keeping to term the Frankish language with the vocables we just used above. It is possible, during the Merovingian times, that the Salian Franks, that part who had passed into Gauls, as they had settled outside the old Frankland, begin more or less to already loose their original identity to Gallic peoples among which they were living. It is also possible however that the sustained interest of their they kept showing for the German territories they considered like a natural area of influence or for Austrasia, which they endowed soon with autonomous kings, allow them to strongly adhere to their Frankish, national roots. As far as the Carolingians are concerned, a well-established fact is that Charlemagne cherished all what was the national culture of his folk, the one of the Ripuarian Franks, the language and clothing included

Charlemagne also is renowned as it had written down the whole of the antique Germanic culture, the one which came from those first Germans who, through the ages, had sung the deeds of their heroes, chieftains and warriors! German heroic epics are mostly related to the period from the 2nd to the 6th centuries A.D., a period of change and destruction with eastern and western Germans settling into new territories and including the downfall of the Roman Empire. At the time of Tacitus already, that Roman writer who had traveled to the northern land and given a description of the people there, Germans were celebrating Arminius, their national heroe who had annihilated the legions of Rome in Teutoburg by the beginnings of the Christian era, and that they have almost divinized, or his son, named Mann, who they considered like he had founded the Germanic nation. Such ancient texts, such epic songs, were tending to get lost by the time of Charlemagne as they had been a oral litterature only and that the most ancient Germanic tongue was now getting forgotten. Charlemagne knew those ancient sagas by heart. The will of Charlemagne to give his national language accurate grammar rules participates of that same will. The written collection Charles compiled with those ancient songs of the Germans unluckily seems to have been lost. Some are thinking that it got burnt by order of Louis the Pious who considered that it was too close to paganism. That worry of recalling great actions of the past however was to be asserted at the Council of Frankfurt, the one which assessed the decisions of Nicea II as it included it with the aesthetic and pedagogical role of pictures in the West. That also featured, according to that logic that the Old Testament was predicting the New one, that ancien conquerors, like Cyrus, Ninus, Alexandre, or Hannibal were predicting the new, like Constantin, Theodosius, Charles Martel, Pippin, or Charlemagne. The value of history, which was known through the writers of Antiquity, through that role, was increased. Others think that part of the work ordered by Charles, or the whole, kept preserved and reached, for example, until the German Minnesängers, those trouveres as Wolfram von Eschenbach, one of those, is writing that he had used for his writings a 'old book,' which might be the collection of Charlemagne. He took in that his 'Emperor Otnit's Sea Journeys' or his 'Adventures of Weigand Dietrich and Those of His Faithful Meister Hiltebrand.' It is also possible that the fragment of a fight as told in Frankish language, and found on the cover of a 8th or 9th century A.D. Latin manuscript, have belonged too to Charles' compilation. Charlemagne was considering the Frankish language like his 'fathers's tongue' and he was writing his surname with a 'K', a letter which is proper to Frank. His royal monogram always was written with that 'K'

Frankish language always was the language of Emperor Louis the Pious, who also mastered Greek and Latin. The Oaths of Strasburg were pronounced in Frank and in Romance as, by the middle of the 10th century A.D. they were still obliged to translated into Frank a speech in Latin, by 948, at the effect that a king understand. The project of a Frankish grammar, as initiated by Charlemagne with the scholars Nannon, Theobald, Alcuin and Berenger, eventually was abandoned at the benefit of other tasks as it was not taken back after the death of Charles. A monk, Otfride, however, a disciple of Rabanus Maurus, pursued the work as his writings in prose or poetry are attesting that he knew well the grammar rules of the Frankish language. According to him, Charlemagne too would have deviced some 'other alphabets' he used to communicate with the 'prefects of the provinces of his vast empire.' Some fragments of that 'Frankish Grammar' by Otfride were anciently published as Otfride himself had conserved fragments of those alphabets. Rabanus Maurus, as far as he is concerned, himself wrote Frankish glossaries, according to the usage of those times when officials and clerics needed to translate into the tongue of the people they ruled, for a government, or Church use, texts or concepts written originally in Latin. Frankish poetry if fond of the alliteration, that technique the Franks invented which is the uniformity of the initial letters in words presenting the main ideas along one same verse and Franks too were the first to use the rime technique, that uniformity in sounds of syllabs ending two verses matching one another. Alliteration did not made it beyond the time of Charlemagne as it is few favourable to the natural move of versification as rime, at the contrary, extended to the whole of Europe

Carolingian Renaissance scholars were taking names of their own with Latin termination and they wrote in Latin, albeit their mother tongue be the Frankish language. They were calling it a 'barbaric' tongue, along with the Greek or Roman use. Provincial councils in 813 A.D. however are stressing the necessity to preach, in churches, with the really practised tongues at the time. Those in Mainz or Reims further told that priests must preach 'according to the propriety of the language' the people is using, so they can understand the meanings of the Divine parole. Such practised, and living tongues, thus, few before Charles' death and in a region like Tours, which is far away from the German lands, included, consist of the 'Romane rustic language' for the people and the 'Theodisc language' for the Franks. Such decisions are found back still during the council of Mainz, by 847 A.D. In a capitulary under Louis the Pioux, by 829, the institution of the dissolution of the ban, by the returning of the count and his men from the army, has his Frankisk name recalled, like 'the ban will have to be dissolved during 40 day, which in theodisc language is called 'scatlegi' or 'a rest in arms'.' Until late, at last, under the Capetians, until in about 1200 A.D., a strong vocabulary with too family and location names, maintained itself, vocabulary proper eventually participating into the synthesis which brough to current French, via the Renaissance endeavour. Frankish language began, as far as his territorial localization is concerned, to get distant from western Francia, or Francia occidentalis -which was to become current France- under King Hugues Capet and then his successors as Frank now was halting at the Vosges mountain range and the borders of Flander. The cause of that retreat mostly was the division of the Carolingian empire, with Frankish lords obliged, by the time of the sharings, to settle definitively in one or another of the new kingdoms. Until now, they had owned lands which were interspearsed along the whole empire! Romance languages, on a other hand, was more and more elevating itself in terms of cultural scale as it eventually got generalized in use through arts, as troubadours and trouveres had it popularized. At last, Frank was supplanted also in the German area by a new German language, called 'swabish' or 'German' as that language there too was generalized by the means of the Minnesägers and eventually became the language at the court of the Hohenstaufen rulers. That new German tongue itself retreated by the Renaissance, in front of a Frankish tongue-modified Saxon language, called 'Frank', or 'Saxon.' Frankish language proper looks like it survived until into our time, in the regions which constitute the border between French and German-speaking areas, like from Flander to Saarland as the current form which is the most closed to how Charlemagne was speaking his national tongue, likely is the language spoken in Luxemburg. Frankish language mostly is a German language, with declinations and genders as it presents further a great freedom to render a same pronunciation. At the difference of Anglo-Saxon peoples, Franks swiftly adopted the Latin alphabet to write their tongue. In some Carolingian era texts, they are harboring some Anglo-Saxon capital letters, like the C, M or Z, and minuscules too, like the g, a barred b (which matches either f or v), or a barred d, which matches th. The 'u', in Frank, is pronounced 'oo' like in 'book' as 'uu' is for 'w', like 'uuan', for example, which is pronounced 'wan' ('when'). A 'uu' when followed with a 'u' means a word featuring three us, like with 'antuuuord' (meaning answer) or with 'uunta', meaning wound