Poitevin

Poitevin is the langue d'oïl of old Poitou in west-central France, grouped with Saintongeais but marked by Occitan features, having arisen on the old oïl–oc frontier. Poitou and Poitiers take their names from the Gaulish Pictones; from Charlemagne's time its counts' inheritance passed via Eleanor of Aquitaine to the English Plantagenets. French arms ended English claims at Taillebourg and the 1259 Treaty of Paris, when Henry III surrendered Poitou to Louis IX.

The dialect appears in thirteenth-century charters and its first printed book followed in 1554; Rabelais had learned it as a schoolboy at Fontenay-le-Comte. Later in the sixteenth century Poitou became a stronghold of the Huguenots; after 1685 many of its Protestant people fled abroad or to the colonies, while southern Poitou emigrants had helped found Acadia from 1604.

Catholic lower Poitou, the future Vendée, rose against the Revolutionary government in 1793, around the same years that the old province was split into Vienne, Deux-Sèvres and Vendée departments.