Why do French people and English people speak different languages?
The Franks and Anglos-Saxons who invaded Western Europe after the Roman Empire fell were both Germanic tribes. They both spoke dialects of Low German, the type of German that is spoken throughout northern Germany. (Dutch is basically a form of Low German too). However. in Roman Gaul the Franks gradually gave up their Germanic language (over a period of about 150 years between 500 A.D. and 650 A.D.). They adopted the native Langue d’oïl and Langue d’oc languages spoken by the Romanized Celtic population of the country instead. Langue d’oïl later became “French” and Lang d’oc later became “Provençal” (or “Occitan”) spoken in the southern half of France. The Anglo-Saxons and their allies from Denmark, the Jutes, were different however. They did not adopt the British form of Latin that was spoken in Roman Britain. Nor did they adopt any of the native Celtic languages of the island which were very similar to Cornish and Welsh. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes continued to speak Germanic, essent
