Lorrain

The Lorrain are the Romance people of Lorraine, the Moselle and Meuse country around Nancy and Metz, whose Oïl vernacular formed beside the Germanic Lorraine Franconian spoken in its northern third and borrowed from it, though in the high Vosges valleys it kept archaic sounds.

The country descends from Lotharingia, the middle Carolingian kingdom named after Emperor Lothair, and after the stem duchy split in 959 its southern half became the Duchy of Upper Lorraine, later Lorraine, capital Nancy. Ruled by the House of Lorraine from 1473, it saw Charles the Bold of Burgundy meet defeat and death in 1477.

The Three Bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun were ceded to France by the Treaty of Chambord in 1552, and French armies occupied the duchy repeatedly during and after the Thirty Years' War. In 1737 it passed to the exiled Polish king Stanislaw Leszczynski, with France to inherit it; on his death in 1766 Lorraine was annexed as a French province.