Bourguignon

The Bourguignon are the people of Burgundy, the country of Dijon and the wooded Morvan hills, whose traditional speech is an Oïl Romance language descended from Vulgar Latin with surviving Gaulish words. The region takes its name from the Burgundians, a Germanic people who settled there in the fifth century and left a notable mark on local vocabulary.

A Duchy of Burgundy emerged early in the tenth century under Richard the Justiciar and was ruled from 1032 by a cadet line of the Capetians; after that line died out in 1361, the Valois duke Philip the Bold built a great Burgundian state stretching into Flanders and the Low Countries.

The venture ended when Charles the Bold fell at Nancy in 1477 and King Louis XI annexed the duchy to the French crown, leaving the Netherlands to the Habsburgs. Bourguignon remained the vernacular of town and countryside, though Parisian French increasingly dominated official life.