Middle French

Middle French (le moyen français) is a historical division of the French language which covers the period from (roughly) 1340 to 1611. It is a period of transition which presents a number of distinct differences from the Old French (l'ancien français) which precedes it and the French spoken in the 17th and 18th centuries ("le français classique") which follows it.

Middle French is the language found in the writings of Villon, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne, Ronsard and the poets of the Pléiade.

The most important change found in Middle French is the complete disappearance of the noun declension system (already underway for centuries). There is no longer a distinction between nominative and accusative forms of nouns, and plurals are indicated simply with an s. This transformation necessitates an increased reliance on the order of words in the sentence, which becomes more or less the syntax of modern French (although there is a notable reliance on the verb in the second position of a sentence at the beginning of this period).

Another major change in this period is the final assendancy of Francien over all other dialects. Regional differences were still extremely pronounced throughout France, and in the south of France the Occitan languages were still predominant while in the north of France other langue d'oil patois other than Francien continued to be spoken, Nevertheless, the Francien dialect was henceforth the official French langauge, relegating other dialects more and more to spoken usage only. Among the elites, Latin was still the language of education, administration and bureaucracy; this changed in 1539, with the Ordonnace of Villers-Cotterets in which François I made French alone the language for legal and juridical acts.

The affirmation and glorification of French finds its greatest manifestation in the "Defense and Illustration of the French Language" (1549) by the poet Joachim du Bellay, which maintained that French (like the Tuscan of Petrarch and Dante) was a worthy language for literary expression and which promulgated a program of linguistic production and purification (including the imitation of Latin genres).

The French wars in Italy and the presence of Italians in the French court brought the French into contact with Italian humanism. Many words dealing with military (alarme, cavalier, espion, infanterie, camp, canon, soldat) and artistic (especially architectural: arcade, architrave, balcon, corridor; also litterary: sonnet) practices were borrowed from the Italian. These tendancies would continue through Classical French.

There were also some borrowings from Spanish (casque) and German (reître) and from the Americas (cacoa, hamac, maïs).

The fascination with classical texts lead to numerous borrowings from Latin and Greek, sometimes to the detriment of Old French words. There were numerous neologisms based on Latin roots and some scholars modified the spelling of French words to bring them into conformity with their Latin roots (unfortunately, this produced a radical difference between a word's spelling and the way it was pronounced).

Finally, the meaning and usage of many words from Old French were transformed.

Spelling and punctuation in this period is extremely erratic. The introduction of printing in 1470 eventually provoked the need for reform in spelling.

This period saw the first publication of French grammar books and the important publication, by Robert Estienne, of a French-Latin dictionary (1539).

The beginning of the 17th century French will see the continued unification of French, the suppression of certain forms, and the prescription of rules. This will become Classical French.