Saintongeais

Saintongeais is a langue d'oïl of the Poitevin–Saintongeais group, spoken along the Atlantic coast of western France in the old provinces of Saintonge, Aunis and Angoumois. Its country takes its name from the Santones, the Gaulish people whose town of Saintes became the first capital of Roman Aquitaine. The speech carries a substrate left by the Limousin Occitan once used there.

In the later Middle Ages Saintonge was a marchland between the Capetian kings and the Plantagenet dukes of Aquitaine; its lords wavered between Paris and Anglo-Aquitaine until Charles VII's armies secured the province for France in 1451.

The seafarer Samuel de Champlain, born near Saintes in 1574, founded Quebec, and settlers from Saintonge carried their speech to Acadia, where it shaped Acadian and later Cajun French. The province was dissolved in 1790 into Charente-Inférieure, while Saintongeais lived on as rural patois.