Understanding Frankish Language Through Primary Sources
Most people asking this question are surprised to learn there's no single Frankish language. The Franks were a loose confederation of Germanic tribes, and they spoke a range of West Germanic dialects that varied by region and dynasty. If you've ever tried to track down early medieval language records, you'll find the sources are scattered and frustratingly fragmentary. The short answer is Franconian, a grouping of West Germanic dialects. But that's the easy part. The harder part is understanding what survives and what doesn't. The Franks conquered large swaths of Gaul in the fifth through eighth centuries, and their language left traces everywhere. You can see it in place names, personal names, legal codes, and loanwords thated into Old French. But a continuous literary tradition in Frankish? That barely exists. I spent months tracking down translations of the Ripuarian Franconian fragments from the Merovingian period. The problem is that most of what we have comes filtered through Latin copies made centuries later. Scribes were approximating sounds they'd never heard, and they occasionally confused Frankish words with Latin or copied them phonetically wrong. When I was cross-referencing the Xanten am Rhin inscription with the Lex Ribuaría manuscript tradition, I found at least six instances where a word had been misread due to paleographic ambiguity. My workaround was to pull the digitized facsimiles from the Monasterium project and examine the original script lines directly rather than trusting secondary transcriptions.
The Salian Franks spoke a different variant from the Ripuarian Franks, and the distinction matters if you're doing anything serious with historical linguistics. Salic Frankish is better attested because the Lex Salica survives in numerous medieval manuscripts, but even that text is primarily Latin with a handful of Frankish legal terms sprinkled throughout. Words like wade (wergild), fractus (to break, as in breaking a treaty), and graft (branch, meaning family line) are the real Frankish material. The Ripuarian side has fewer direct sources but shows up more clearly in toponymy across the Cologne and Bonn regions. Here's something most beginners miss: the famous Oaths of Strasbourg from 842 are sometimes cited as evidence of early Romance, not Frankish. They're actually in a form of early Old French mixed with Old High German. The Germanic portion is closer to what the eastern Franks were speaking, but it's already moving toward what we'd call Old High German, not Frankish. The linguistic boundary between Franconian and Alemannic dialects was blurry in the ninth century, and Carolingian scribal conventions didn't respect those boundaries either. If you're looking for the closest thing to a pure Frankish text, you're going to have a hard time. The Muspilli poem, usually dated to the late ninth century, is often classified as Bavarian rather than Frankish. The Hildebrandslied is Old High German from Saxony. You're always one dialect shift away from something else. What survives of actual Frankish is mostly in the form of glosses—words inserted between Latin lines in manuscripts. The Heidelberg Cato and the Abrogans are two collections where Franconian vocabulary appears, but they're not long enough to give you any real sense of the grammar or syntax.
The etymological dictionary approach works better if you want practical results. Take a modern Low Franconian language like Limburgish or East Flemish, look up the oldest attested forms, and trace them back through medieval glosses. A word like Dutch guld (gold) or vrij (free) has clear Frankish ancestry, but you need to be careful about false cognates. Latin liber and Frankish frid (peace/freedom) look related but aren't. I've seen this mistake repeated in academic papers because researchers assume phonological proximity equals etymological connection without checking the sound change rules. Another common pitfall is assuming the Franks spoke something recognizable as Dutch or German. They didn't. The standard languages emerged centuries later from different dialect centers. Middle Dutch and Early High German are both descendants of Frankish, but they diverged and developed independently. The Frankish period is really the late antique to early medieval era, roughly the fifth through eighth centuries, and the language from that time is reconstructed mostly from later records. You're always working with approximations. The legal codes are your best starting point if you want to study this. The Lex Salica, Lex Ripuaria, and the other Barbarian laws contain Frankish terms that were current in Merovingian and Carolingian administrative practice. But these texts are in Latin. The Frankish elements are marginal. You'll need a specialized dictionary like the Wörterbuch zur Lex Salica or Krause's Wörterbuch der altfränkischen Sprache to make sense of the vocabulary. These resources are dense and not always easy to access, but they're necessary if you're doing original research rather than just skimming summaries.
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Place names are perhaps the most reliable evidence because they resist the kind of scribal corruption that affects glosses. Suffixes like -court, -heim, -ingen, and -rode appear repeatedly in the former Frankish heartland and mark areas where Franconian speech was dominant. The -ingen plural genitive suffix in particular is a strong indicator of early Frankish settlement patterns across the Low Countries and western Germany. One final note on sources: the digital corpora have improved dramatically in the last few years. The Perseus and Thesaurus Linguae Latinae databases now include more medieval manuscripts than they did a decade ago, and the Dictionnaire de l'ancien français has expanded its coverage into the earlier Germanic loanword layer. If you're doing this kind of research yourself, bookmark those. They'll save you hours of library time compared to what was available even five years ago.
