Francien

Francien denotes the people of the Paris basin, above all Île-de-France, whose Romance oïl dialect was spoken across Orléanais, Touraine, Berry and Bourbonnais in the Middle Ages. Descended from the Vulgar Latin of Roman Gaul with a layer of Germanic Frankish words, the dialect of Paris and the royal demesne gained prestige as the Capetian kings built their power around the city.

From the fourteenth century it spread through royal courts and charters, and the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 made French the language of law and administration in place of Latin.

The Académie française, founded in 1635, policed a written standard, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French had become the language of European diplomacy, courts and letters, carried overseas by colonial expansion into Canada, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.