11 Facts About Old French

Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligible yet diverse, spoken in the northern half of France.

Region where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the northern half of the Kingdom of France and its vassals, and the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine to the east, but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England and the Crusader states as the language of a feudal elite and commerce.

The Norman dialect was spread to England and Ireland, and during the crusades, Old French was spoken in the Kingdom of Sicily, and in the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Levant.

Second-oldest document in Old French is the Eulalia sequence, which is important for linguistic reconstruction of Old French pronunciation due to its consistent spelling.

Old French gave way to Middle French in the mid-14th century, paving the way for early French Renaissance literature of the 15th century.

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Lyric poets in Old French are called trouveres – etymologically the same word as the troubadours of Provencal or langue d'oc.

Large body of fables survive in Old French; these include literature dealing with the recurring trickster character of Reynard the Fox.

Old French was constantly changing and evolving; however, the form in the late 12th century, as attested in a great deal of mostly poetic writings, can be considered standard.

Old French maintained a two-case system, with a nominative case and an oblique case, for longer than some other Romance languages as Spanish and Italian did.

Old French has much less analogical reformation than Modern French has and significantly less than the oldest stages of other languages despite the fact that the various phonological developments in Gallo-Romance and Proto-French led to complex alternations in the majority of commonly-used verbs.

Old French Occitan preserved this tense, with a conditional value; Spanish still preserves this tense, as does Portuguese.