Old French

Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; Modern French ancien français) was the Gallo-Romance dialect continuum spoken from the 9th century to the 14th century. In the 14th century, these dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl, contrasting with the langue d'oc or "Occitan" language in the south of France. The mid-14th century is taken as the transitional period to Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance, specifically based on the dialect of the Île-de-France region.

The territory where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the historical Kingdom of France and its vassals (including parts of the Angevin Empire which during the 12th century remained under Anglo-Norman rule), and Burgundy, Lorraine and Savoy to the east (corresponding to modern north-central France, Belgian Wallonia, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy) but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England, Sicily and the Crusader states as the language of a feudal elite and of commerce (the term lingua franca indeed derives from the name of the French language, even though the Romance-based pidgin so identified was substantially based on Occitan and Italian).