Old Frankish

Old Frankish was the language spoken by the Germanic Franks in the Low Countries and adjacent parts of contemporary France and Germany between the 4th and 8th century. It belongs to the West Germanic language group and is thought to have given rise to the modern Franconian languages. The Franks, who were divided into two groups: the Salian Franks and the Ripuarian Franks, probably spoke a range of related dialects and languages rather than a single uniform dialect or language. Knowledge of Old Frankish is almost entirely reconstructed from Old Dutch and from etyma and loanwords from Old French. A notable exception is the Bergakker inscription found in 1996, which may be a direct attestation of Old Frankish.

The Franks descended from Germanic tribes that settled parts of the Netherlands and western Germany during the early Iron Age. From the 4th century, they are attested as extending into what is now the southern Netherlands and northern Belgium. In the 5th and 6th centuries, they expanded their realm and conquered Roman Gaul completely as well as client states such as Bavaria and Thuringia.

During this period, Old Frankish had a major influence on the lexicon, pronunciation and grammar of the Romance languages spoken in former Roman Gaul. As a result, many modern French words and placenames (including the country name "France") have a Germanic origin. Between the 5th and 8th century, Old Frankish, as spoken by the Salian Franks, evolved into Old Dutch (Old Low Franconian), a language that remained spoken in the area that was originally held by the Salian Franks of the 4th century (i.e., what is now the southern Netherlands and northern Belgium), while in Picardy and Île-de-France it was eclipsed by Old French as the dominant language.

Urban T. Holmes proposes that a Germanic language was spoken as a second tongue by public officials in western Austrasia and Neustria as late as the 850s, and that it completely disappeared as a spoken language from these regions only during the 10th century.