sally cinnamon wrote:
I've got a question, what language did the Normans speak when they conquered us?
Norman French ... like French, only different.
Most "French" people as we now know them didn't speak "French" as we now know it but spoke their own local language.
sally cinnamon wrote:
If they spoke French then how come we didn't end up speaking French? Were they actually French?
Well, they were Norman ... descended from Norsemen who "settled" in the fertile limestone area now known as Normandy.
To communicate with the Lord of the Manor you'd speak French but, out in the fields, English was still the lingua franca (
sorry), so a sheep, which is Schaff in German, a word brought here by the Angles (or Saxons, not sure which) out in the field became Mouton by the time it got to the Lord of the Manor's table.
As Dally mentioned, many of their words entered our language.
For many centuries if you wanted to show you were "educated" or sophisticated, you'd drop a few French words into your conversations, hence Shakespeare used French-speaking as a theatrical device to show how a character had ideas above his social station.
EDIT - Forgot to mention, as late as the 1790's, only about 12% of French people spoke what we now call French.
