Ricardolindo
Well-known member
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If the Franks had only conquered Northern Gaul, ie everything north of the Loire, could they have Germanized it?
100,000 or so Franks.
10,000,000 or so Gauls. Cut that in half for only the northern half, roughly.
And Franks who only hold half Gauls would have to face much bigger legitimacy issues as well as being pressed by neighbouring attacks much harder.
Why would they want to, anyway? The Gallo-Roman culture and administrative system was clearly attractive to them as a way to rule conquered lands.
You'd need them to go even smaller for that to happen.
I wonder if a slightly stronger Gallo-Roman remnant that wins a battle or two could shove them into a Normandy style deal where they only take a region and settle it?
Looking back at this thread, I don't see why Northern Gaul couldn't have been Germanized. South Tyrol, which is south of the Alps, was Germanized. Lots of similarly populated regions have switched languages fairly quickly. Look at the Slavicization of the Balkans or at the Arabization of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. More importantly, Neustria was bilingual until the Treaty of Verdun. Indeed, I have even seen it argued that if Neustria had been attached to Saxony instead of Aquitaine, the Frankish language would have prevailed.
What you need to remember is that the "official" languages are just a thing of the nobility anyway, in that era. The peasants all spoke their local patois and who their overlord was isn't going to change it. You'd need to actually settle large enough numbers of lower class Franks to have an impact on that.
Frankish nobles retaining a distinct language like the British nobility did under the Normans? Yeah that I could see.
I cited several cases of similarly populated regions switching languages fairly quickly, to which I can add the Turkification of Anatolia. Also, again, Neustria was bilingual until the Treaty of Verdun attached it to Aquitaine, which was almost entirely Romance speaking.
And again, I'll insist that "bilingual" and "switching languages" are just looking at the surface layer and never accurately describe the lower classes well. Which country you attach a region to has almost no bearing on this because policy just didn't reach that low.
The Turkish settlement in Anatolia is a very different beast because Turkish people were entire migratory tribes settling in, and because religion creates another layer entirely, which is more likely to reach into lower classes than language.
There was heavy Frankish settlement north of the Loire. In our timeline, the border between Romance and Germanic languages was already moved southwards and westwards.