History Memes

Recently I read a comment on here saying that French was older than English. I also randomly remembered that I learned that several countries in Europe are actually younger than the US. Italy feels like it’s older than the US but the country wasn’t unified till the 19th century.

Anyway I’m getting sidetracked. The point is that I decided to look into when the French started regulating language and discovered that English is older than French.

Now, Vulgar Latin, from which French and other romance languages originated is older than Old English. However, since it’s the source of the other Romance languages which aren’t French, I’d say it doesn’t count as French.

The oldest Old French we have is from 842AD, but old English fragments are as old as the 5th century.

Early modern french seems to date back to the 1500s (“Paris Latin” was still a thing during this time), but Early Modern English predates 1500 in the beginning of the vowel shift.

Now the end of the English vowel shift probably happened after the Académie française was first established; however, common people in France at the time did not speak this formalized French. Furthermore, the work of the Academy was ended and the academy abolished during the Revolution. It was only after 1816 that the academy was restored and the idea of having a single unified language was supported by the French government. Late modern English (current English) was established by that point.

Anyway long story short, English is older than French if only by a century or two through their histories. This might not seem like a big surprising time difference, but it was a bit of a shock to me.