Picard

The Picards are people of the chalk plains of northern France, from Amiens and Arras to Boulogne and Roman Flanders around Lille, its speech reaching Hainaut in modern Belgium. Picard, a chief langue d'oil, is a Gallo-Romance tongue written before 1000, distinguished from Parisian by conservative sounds such as hard k where Paris palatalized: Picard keval against French cheval.

In the feudal age the country was split among countships such as Boulogne, Ponthieu and Vermandois; its name, from Old French pic or pike, appears early in the thirteenth century, when students of the northern speech area formed the Picard nation at Paris University.

The Hundred Years' War brought the Jacquerie peasant rising of 1358; Picardy passed to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy from 1419, confirmed by the Congress of Arras in 1435, and Louis XI occupied it in 1477 as the Burgundian inheritance broke apart. Along the northern edge the Picard world met Flemish, leaving bilingual towns such as Lille.