Old French

Old French was the language spoken across the northern half of France from roughly the late eighth century to the middle of the fourteenth. It was not one unified tongue but a group of mutually intelligible Romance dialects that came to be called the langues d'oil, in contrast to the langues d'oc of the south, the emerging Occitano-Romance languages. Its dialects included Burgundian, Picard, Norman, Walloon, Gallo and Lorrain, and several of them developed into modern regional languages such as Picard, Walloon, Gallo and Norman. The Norman Conquest carried Old French to England and Ireland, where Anglo-Norman later declined into the Law French used by lawyers, and the Crusades brought it to the Kingdom of Sicily, the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the mid-fourteenth century Middle French emerged in the Ile-de-France as the language of the French Renaissance and the predecessor of Modern French.