this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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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.
I bet those Old English fragments were way easier to understand for speakers of Old Saxon that for a 1500s English speaker.
Yeah, that’s definitely true
I realized in like 4th grade that I could parse various Latin languages okay just from knowing some Spanish. I thought old English would be the same or easier… nope. Beowulf still looks more like Icelandic than English
I like how languages evolve, but recently they've domesticated themselves. But languages like English are more like free range language.
"English is older than French" is a weird way to put it. "English spelling was standardised a century before French spelling" might be a better. After all, both languages existed the whole time but are named differently by periods in history for convenience. There's no way to say "Middle English ended in 1658" for example.
Interesting. I think the real question about "is it the same language?" is whether modern readers can still understand it.
For early modern English (think Shakespeare) then most modern speakers can. You'd probably have a basic understanding from reading, although missing some nuance. A lot of the jokes in Shakespeare come out better when they're performed, so you'd probably have a better understanding of it in the theatre.
For middle English (think Chaucer) then you'd struggle a bit. Vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot. Might have a few passages in the Canterbury Tales that make sense unaided, but in general, not really.
For early English (think Beowulf) ha ha, fat chance. Even scholars of early languages don't understand everything in it, there's a few words the meaning of which are lost, but in general about one word in fifty even looks familiar and it's probably a false friend.
So I'd probably put English at 'about 500 years old'.
How far back modern French speakers can understand French would be interesting. I can understand a fair amount of Latin from my knowledge of Spanish; and unlike eg. William the Bastard invading England and introducing a whole pile of new vocabulary, the French have the advantage of never having been invaded by the French ;-)
Some of Shakespeare's puns actually don't work unless one uses the pronunciations of his time period.
This is a very arbitrary way of looking at the problem and you won't see serious linguists claiming this sort of stuff. Latin branching off into a variety of languages and Old English not branching off doesn't change anything about the relationship between Latin and French as opposed to OE vs. Modern English. They're a "parent" and "child" language, and whehter they have any "siblings" is a consequence of their geographical distribution (occupy more space > changes in language not reaching all areas equally > divergence into dialects and languages). Besides, OE is also a parent of Scots, so you actually can't count it as an unambiguous ancestor of Modern English.
Comparing a district in Paris actively using Latin and English undergoing the vowel shift is mixing up internal and external linguistic phenomena.
All the stuff about Académie is not relevant for determining the identity of a language. Institutions tend to have only surface-level effect on language (spelling, prescribing some words, etc., hardly anything that can create or end a language).
Fair points, I’m not a linguist. I mostly was just going off the dates I could find for old-early-middle-modern periods for each language.
The end of the vowel shift was what seemed to separate early-modern from late-modern English, and the establishment of the academy marks the beginning of modern regulations on the French language. As such I thought those were good enough markers to compare the current versions with each other.
Anyway good point about old English also being the source of a language that isn’t English. And yeah I mean trying to gauge the age of a language is bound to be arbitrary since languages don’t abruptly change. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation. At what point did one language become another? Are they the same because we call them all English or are they different because old English and modern English don’t appear to be the same language?