Did the Franks speak French or German?

Left on its own, language drifts badly.  Beowulf is a german dialect before 1000 AD, Chaucer is written four centuries later and shakesphere is a century after that.  any English literature student knows what fun is to had reading any of it.  Shakespheare is four centuries ago.

However, just then we landed the King James Bible which began to slowly work its magic and forced a more common vernacular.  Sort of if you have ever listened to cockney.  My point is that oral language drifts horribly and takes real effort to grasp across fence lines let alone a century or so.

So English does have the Bible.  The Germans have Martin Luther but the differences werre much worse.  Political unification finally forced the issue in the nineteenth century for Germany and elsewhere thereafter.

So yes all modern languages are recent at best and deeply influenced by key texts once established.  Surely Dante for itally and Cervantes for Spain.

So this question has no simple real answer.

Did the Franks speak French or German?

First, let’s get something out of the way, French and German are modern languages. What you know as French and German today did not exist back then, instead there were a number of Germanic and Romance languages spoken across what is now France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Low Countries etc.

To give you an example, at the time of the French Revolution (which occurred in the late 18th century btw, so I am not exactly talking about ancient history here) only about 30% of France’s population could speak French, as there were a wide variety of “dialects” spoken accross France. Germany formed its linguistic unity even later.

The shortest answer to this question is that the Franks spoke… well, Frankish, which is a Germanic language. However, Frankish and modern Standard German come from different subfamilies of Germanic languages. Frankish belongs to the West Germanic language family, while modern Standard German or High German evolved from Central and Southern German dialects. Yes, Frankish was closer to German than French but it was quite different from what you know as German today. Modern Dutch and Frankish both originated from the same language family, so Dutch is one of the closest surviving relatives of Frankish, but of course modern Dutch has changed quite a bit through the centuries.

But there are a lot of other things to consider here. Franks had been in contact with the Romans for a long time. But from 4th century onwards, they started to settle in Roman territories, where ancestors of modern Romance languages were spoken.

Franks came to rule over Romance speakers and eventually at least some of the Franks, especially those who settled in what is now northern France adopted Latin. In fact, it was Charlemagne who wanted to enforce a standard “Latin” language over its Romance speaking population, because Latin had diverged so much to the point that regional dialects were no longer mutually intelligible, but everybody simply thought that the language they spoke was Latin. Keep in mind that Latin was also the literary language and the prestigious language, so it was important at the height of the Carolingian Renaissance, a time of rapid development of Europe, to introduce a common literary language.

Carolingian Empire at its height

To that end, Charlemagne, a Frankish ruler charged a Christian monk from Britain called Alcuin to reform Latin’s orthography and pronunciation as well as to create the Carolingian minuscule, which formed the basis of modern Latin script.

Alcuin is an interesting choice because he was from Britain, the least Romanized part of the Western Roman Empire. The standard Latin used in Europe well until the Middle Ages, was based on Alcuin’s reforms, including the Ecclesiastical Latin, which is the Latin used by the Catholic Church even today.

Alcuin

After the death of Charlemagne and his son Louis, the Frankish Empire was divided between the sons of Louis. West Francia transformed into Kingdom of France and retained its Romance language, East Francia eventually became the Holy Roman Empire and Middle Francia was eventually partitioned.

In fact, the Oaths of Strasbourg (a pact between Charles the Bald who got the West Francia and Louis the German who got the East Francia) was written in both Romance and Germanic, which further illustrates the bilinguality of the Frankish Empire.

Map of Middle Francia, sandwiched between West and East Francia

So, yes the native language of the Frankish people was indeed Germanic but a significant number of Franks adopted the language(s) that would eventually evolve into modern French and the Franks did play a big role in the evolution of Romance languages.

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