What was Charlemagne’s native language? Most people might answer French, but in the area in which he was born they did not then speak French, as we know it. Scholars believe it was a form of a German idiom, but which one? Some argue it was a Germanic dialect of the Ripuarian Franks, and others say he did not speak Old Frankish at all. Linguists have reconstructed old Frankish today by loanwords in Old French, and from its descendent, Old Low Franconian, a tongue which is the ancestor of the Dutch language and the modern dialects heard in the German area of North Rhineland; these dialects were named Ripuarian by modern linguists. Old Frankish, though, is a mystery today because all we have left of it are phrases and words in the law codes of the main Frankish tribes (the Salian and Ripuarian Franks), which are written in Latin but sprinkled with Germanic phrases. The Franconian language was a form of Lower German, but in some areas it was being replaced with a form of Old High German.
Sound confusing? The problem is that Charlemagne was born in an area of great linguistic diversity. If we went to Liege around the year 750, we would hear Old East Low Franconian in the city, north and northwest; Old Ripuar-ian Franconian to the east and in Aachen; and Gallo-Romance (the ancestor of the Walloon dialect of Old French) in the south and southwest. The one confirmation that he might have spoken a German dialect comes from the fact that he gave his children Old High German names.
What else did he speak? We have evidence that he spoke Latin fluently and understood Greek—Einhard, his biographer, writes, “Grecam vero melius in-tellegere quam pronuntiare poterat,” or “He understood Greek better than he could pronounce it” (26). It is also possible that he spoke Arabic, for in the fifteenth-century Irish work the Gabhaltais Shearluis Mhoir or Conquests of Charlemagne from the Book of Lismore, it states, “When Agiolandus heard the Saracen language from Charlemagne he marveled at it greatly. For when Charlemagne was a youth he had been among the Paynims in the city which is called Toletum (Toledo) and he had learnt the language of the Saracens in that city” (Hyde 35).
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