New The introduction of Christianity gave additional impulse to the study of Latin which soon became the official language of the Christian Church; and it was taught everywhere by the priests to the middle and upper classes; and they also encouraged the masses to learn it. It seemed as if this was destined to maintaiq the prestige of Latin as the official language of the country. But in reality it hastened its downfall, by making it more and more the language of the illiterate masses. Soon the rural districts furnished priests who spoke their own Roman tongue; and the struggle to rehabilitate the literary Latin among the masses was abandoned. The numerous French dialects of Latin had already begun to assume shape when the decline of the Roman Empire brought the Germanic tribes down upon Gaul and introduced a new element into the Romanic speech, whiCh had already worked its will upon the tongue of the Czsars. Under its influence the loose Latin construction disappeared; articles and prepositions took the place of the inflectional terminations brought to a high state of artificial perfection in Latin; and the wholesale suppression of unaccented syllables had so contracted the Latin words that they were often scarcely recognizable. The modification of vowel sounds increased the efficacy of the disguise assumed by Latin words masquerading in the Romanic dialects through out Gaul; and the Celtic and other native words in current use to designate the interests and occupations of the masses helped to differentiate the popular speech from the classical Latin. Already Celtic, as a spoken tongue, had almost entirely disappeared from the cities; and even in the rural districts it had fallen into a cer tain amount of neglect, as the lingua franca of the first centuries of Roman occupation, reach ing out in. every direction, became the ever increasing popular speech.
Germanic The strongest proof that the rustic Latin had become the speech of the muses of Gaul is found in the fact that the Germans, in the course of two centuries, were able to have very little basic influence over it, Had Celtic been still generally spoken, the over throw of the Roman power and the introduc tion of German rule must either have imposed the German language upon Gaul or allowed the ancient Celtic to assert itself once more. What did happen was that the conquerors, having to do for the most part with the masses, found that they could do this most conveniently through the medium of the Romanic dialects. The general business of the people of Gaul seems to have suffered but comparatively small inconvenience and derangement on account of the Germanic conquest, as the invaders never came in sufficient number§ to dispossess the original inhabitants who were much more civil ized than their masters. The conquerors seem to have soon accommodated themselves to the life of the Gaulish people, the majority of whom were still largely of Celtic blood. One of the immediate effects of the Germanic con quest was to hasten the downfall of the Celtic tongue even in those parts of the country where it still maintained its ascendency, and to drive out Latin as the speech of the ruling classes. The latter, thus dethroned, still remained, how ever, the official language of the Christian Church. But even by the ecclesiastics it was spoken and written with much less of its liter ary elegance, and tended to become more and more an artificial speech, since even with the priests, after a century of. German occupation
of Gaul, it was always an acquired tongue. A century later, we are told, Latin was understood in Gaul by only a very few, but rustic Latin was understood by everybody?' In the 8th century, so thoroughly had the Romanic tongue become the property of the masses of the people that Charlemagne required sermons to be preached in that tongue, into which the homilies of the Church councils bad been al ready translated for some considerable time.
Fortunatus states that, in the 6th century, Celtic was still extensively used in the rural districts of Gaul. It was spoken among the natives while the Roman tongue served to com municate with the cities and towns where it had already become the common speech of the masses and the classes alike. The dethrone ment of classical Latin as the court tongue and the substitution of German in its place gave the Roman language still greater importance as the one means of communication between the dwell ers in the cities and towns and those of the rural districts. Naturally so long as the German con quest continued and the hold of the Franks and other Germanic tribes was not secure on the greater part of the territory of Gaul, the court language of the new masters was German. It was also the tongue of the German officials in office and in private life. The Druidical reli gion, which had, even before the fall of Rome, retreated to the mountains and other inaccess ible parts of the country, seems to have made a final effort to establish Celtic as the language of the masses. But this influence proved altogether local; for the Druidical priests were too far from the centre of activity of the na tion and from the spirit of the age.. The Ro mance tongue, therefore, standing midway be tween the reactionary religio-Celtic element and the court, drew both toward it by the mere force of its general extension and commanding central position. It has been customary to say that the German invaders lost their language in France because they were an uncultured race placed as masters over a cultured. But this is only half a truth. The Germans conquered Gaul and garrisoned it; but they never popu lated it in the sense of dispossessing the Gaulo Romanic inhabitants. There is every reason to believe that the invading German host was so comparatively small that it was, in the course of time, easily absorbed by the solidarity of the vast native population rather than by its cul tural superiority. In the course of nearly five centuries the boasted Latin civilization, with all its genius for organization and for imposing itself on conquered races, had succeeded only in forcing upon the people of Gaul, or a part thereof, the most distorted and battered sem blance of its own noble tongue. And at the end of this long period of time the daughter had so grown away from the mother speech that they stood apart as strangers who could not understand one another. It was quite natural, therefore, that the German invaders, compara tively few in numbers, should have succumbed in the course of time to this powerful young speech, just as the Norman invaders of Eng land, in the course of two centuries, lost their native tongue—this same powerful Romanic speech — to the overpowering strength of the Saxons and the virility of the English tongue.