Northern France (langue d'oïl)

Northern France, whose dialect became the French language by decision rather than by nature. The langue d'oil group - Francien, Norman, Picard, Walloon and others, named for their word for yes - covered northern Gaul, and the variety spoken around Paris had no special merit except that the Capetian kings ruled from there. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets in 1539 required legal proceedings in French rather than Latin, which also meant not in the regional tongues. The Academie francaise was founded in 1635 to fix and purify the language, an institution with no real equivalent elsewhere. The revolution turned linguistic unification into a political project: the Abbe Gregoire's report of 1794 found that a minority of citizens spoke French properly and recommended annihilating the patois in the name of equality. Third Republic schooling from the 1880s carried that out. The region contains Paris, the Ile-de-France, Normandy, Picardy and the Loire, and its architecture gave Europe the Gothic - Saint-Denis, Chartres, Reims, Amiens. Norman French shaped English after 1066. The Somme and Verdun are in this ground. The region holds around a third of France's population, most of it in the Paris basin. Mont-Saint-Michel, Versailles, Chartres and the Loire chateaux are World Heritage sites. Champagne and Calvados come from here. Paris has been the largest city in France for a thousand years. Norman and Picard survive as regional languages with small numbers of speakers, and Norman is still spoken in the Channel Islands as Jerriais and Guernesiais, outside France entirely. Rouen, Reims and Orleans were among medieval Europe’s major cities.

• Existed: 1000 CE – present
• Type: Entity