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Originally Posted by Linda16
Although you seem to be proud of this develepoment, I consider such kind of shift "to the correct language" as a negative act. Don't you think that dialects add richness to the language? This shift "to a proper language" can be named also as a "killing of a dialect".
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Well, nothing was really lost, all French dialects had evolved from the same source: vulgar Latin, they were all different but also similar, not different enough to become separate languages, but not similar enough to allow easy communication between French people. In the Middle Ages, French dialects had diverged so much that communication between French people had become quite difficult, people from Normandy could barely understand people from Aquitaine or from Burgundy, the irony being that a few centuries earlier those regions could perfectly communicate because all those people spoke the same vulgar Latin. Actually throughout the Middle Ages, educated people, the clergy, and the aristocracy often reverted to classical Latin to communicate with each other because of the understanding problems between the many French dialects.
The first purpose of a language is to allow communication between people, when that language has split into so many variants that communication is no longer possible, there is a problem.
So yes, at some point, French kings decided that it was no longer practical to continue to use classical Latin to communicate within the elite while the people spoke various French dialects and did not understand a word of Latin. It was decided that the French dialect spoken by the aristocracy in Paris would become the official French and be taught to the entire population so communication on a national level would become easy and efficient.
But again, i don't think that anything was lost because all French dialects were variations of the same theme.
Things would have been different if Norman had come from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. From the 10th century, Vikings were the new rulers of Normandy (hence the name of the region) and thousands of Vikings settled in Normandy, but for some reason, instead of keeping Old Norse and imposing it on the local Gaulish populations, they did the opposite, Vikings abandoned Old Norse and learned the local French dialect.
If Norman had derived from Old Norse, it would have survived, just like Breton survived in Brittany, or Alsatian in Alsace, because they were non-Latin dialects and therefore significantly different and worth keeping.
But actually, the
Norman dialect has not completely disappeared yet, it's still spoken by a few thousand people in Normandy and the Channel Islands of
Jersey and
Guernsey (the Channel Islands used to be part of the Duchy of Normandy, they were forgotten in the cession act between England and France), but just like Norman was replaced by French in Normandy, it's being replaced by English in the Channel Islands, it will probably disappear with the death of the people who currently speak it.
You can see an example of Norman on
this sign at Jersey airport.