Have you ever heard that a third of the English vocabulary comes from French? If you speak or at least are somehow familiar with both English and French, you have for sure noticed there are really a lot of similar words! In this blog post you'll discover WHY it is so and WHEN English and French came across each other!
ARE THEY REALLY SO SIMILAR TO ONE ANOTHER?
When talking about languages, we should not forget about so-called language families. All languages are in fact living creatures - after they are born, they enter a specific family, grow up and then die... There are hundreds of different language families with their own "traditions" and "customs". Let's have a look at one of the biggest families - the Indo-European language family. It includes such languages as English, Spanish, French, Russian, German and other popular nowadays languages. They actually make the Indo-European language family the biggest one at the present with 46% of the world's population speaking a language belonging to this family!
BUT it doesn't mean that all languages from the same language family will look alike or at least be similar to each other because a language family is divided into different branches or groups.
In the case of the Indo-European language family it looks like this:
As you can see, English, being a Germanic language, must have even more in common with German or Afrikaans than with French, which is in the same group of the Romance languages as Italian or Spanish!
GOING DEEPER INTO HISTORY
Okay, now we know that English and French belong to the same language family but to its different branches. Then why are there so many similar words in both languages?
To understand that, we need to go ten centuries back! The year of 1066 is really important in the English history and known as the Norman Conquest of England. It was a French Duke that decided to conquer England in September of 1066 and who later became known as William the Conqueror or William I of England. After his coronation England and France came into a long period of interaction.
French became a language of the royal court and aristocrats, the Church and education... In short, if you spoke English in those times, you'd be considered a person of a low class from a rural area of the country.
French had been a language of the English nobility for centuries! Noble English families of high class would teach their children French, English kings would marry French princesses...
Like, for example, Henry II Plantagenet married Eleanor of Aquitaine in the XII century.
Was there any end of this "French rule" over English at all? Yes!
The Hundred Years' War completely ended the expansion of the French language in England because people thought of it as the language of their enemy. By the middle of the XIV century, English again had become the main language at the University of Oxford. Finally! After so much time... Over 200 years!
FRENCH BORROWINGS IN ENGLISH
There are many linguists who still can't decide on the exact percentage of the words with French origins in English - some claim that it's a third of all the words in English, meanwhile others say it's even two thirds!
What we can do is to look at the examples and decide for ourselves who has a point.
French words in English: authority, crime, arrest, army, battle, duke, servant, peasant, justice, abbey, saint, faith, robe, gown, collar, satin, diamond, embroidery, logic, remedy, poison, etc.
As you can see, the majority of the words that came from French belong to the vocabulary of law, fashion, government, medicine, etc. It's no surprise as we've already seen that French in England was used only by the royalty, elite and high classes.
Another peculiarity that exists in English is the vocabulary related to food. Here's what I mean:
cow --- beef
sheep --- mutton
pig --- pork
Both things from each group actually used to mean the same, but after some time a killed animal on a plate got a French name and the one that was still alive on a farm was left with an English one. (Is there any coincidence that the poor and low class were the ones who worked on farms with cows, sheep or pigs and the ones from the elite met only with beef, mutton and pork already on their plates..?)
CONCLUSION
Being languages of different Indo-European family subgroups and different historical backgrounds, English and French surprisingly share a lot of vocabulary in common which might be really helpful if you're learning both languages. But don't forget about the so-called "false friends", English and French have rather large number of them, too!
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