Modern French dialects developed from Vulgar Latin which was brought due to Roman Conquest of Northern Gaul in the first century BC. The history of language has witnessed Gallo Romance Period (5th-8th Centuries), Old French (9th-13th Centuries), Middle French (14th-15th Centuries), Early Modern French (16th Century), Classical Modern French (17th-18th Century), and Contemporary Modern French (19th Century onwards).
The standard for French is based on the dialect of ÃŽle de France (technically known as Francien) which has been the official standard language since the mid-16th century. Francien has largely replaced other regional dialects of French spoken in northern and central France; these dialects made up the so-called Langue d’oÃ¯l (the term is based on the French use of the word oÃ¯l, modern oui, for yes). French dialects are classified in 5 groups:
Central: Francien, OrlÃ©anais, Bourbonnais, Champenois; Northern: Picard, Northern Norman, Walloon (usually considered a separate language); Eastern: Lorrain, Bourguignon (Burgundian), Franc-Comtois; Western: Norman, Gallo (around the Celtic Breton area), Angevin, Maine; Southwestern: Poitevin, Saintongeais, Angoumois.
More than 200 phonetic laws were operating in the transformation of Latin into French. The most essential of them is the suppression of the short vowels before and of all vowels after the stressed vowel; this resulted, at first, in the formation of consonant accumulations that were subsequently simplified and this led to great changes in the sounds of words as compared to their Latin parent forms as well as to cognates in the other Romance languages:
L anima(m) soul => OF anme => ModF Ã¢me;
L civitÃ¢te(m) city => OF citez => ModF citÃ© etc.
The French pronunciation was deeply influenced by the language of the pre-Roman Celts (amongst them probably the specific pronunciation of u as [y]) and of the later Germanic invaders (especially the Franks who gave the modern name of France). The initial Germanic w- was replaced by g(u)- in Francien:
Gmc werra => F guerre war;
Gmc wardan => F garder to guard.
Modern French has 15 vowels and 20 consonants. The vowels are opened and close (as [e] : [o]), labialized ([Å“], [Ã¸], [y]) and nasalized. The sometime great number of diphthongs was largely reduced; the modern language is marked especially by the rising diphthongs ui and oi (pronounced [wa]). The stress is fixed on the ultimate syllable of the word. The words, being relatively short, are pronounced in groups marked by a comon accent. The speech flow in modern French is rated at 320 words per minute.
The present day French pronunciation may be characterized as modus intensus — the words consists predominantly of open syllables (i.e. ending in vowels), the falling diphthongs are suppressed, and the lips are used actively in the articulation of the sounds.
Two third of the French vocabulary is derived from Latin. The basic words are inherited from Vulgar Latin and often are marked by some slang bias as compared with Classical Latin, cf.:
F tÃªte head