ion and the inhabitants of the cities and towns.
This consisted of a frame of Latin words stripped of most of their
inflections and subjected to word-contractions and other modifications.
Into this frame were fitted many native words which had already become
the property of trade and commerce and the other activities of life in
the city, town, and country. Thus, as the influence of Latin became
stronger in the cities, it continued to exercise greater pressure on the
rural districts. This pressure soon began to react upon the centers of
Latin culture. The uneducated classes of Gaul everywhere, even in the
cities, spoke very imperfect Latin, the genius of which is so different
from that of the native tongues of Gaul. But while the cities afforded
some correction for this universal tendency among the masses to corrupt
the Latin language, the life of the rural districts, where the native
tongues were still universally spoken, made the disintegration of the
highly inflected Roman speech unavoidable. As the masses in the city and
country became more Latinized, at the expense of their native tongues,
the corrupted Latin spoken over immense districts of the country tended
to pass current as the speech of the populace and to crowd out classical
or school Latin. As this corrupted local Latin varied greatly in
different parts of the country, due to linguistic and other influences,
there resulted numerous Roman dialects throughout Gaul, many of which
are still in existence.

The introduction of Christianity gave additional impulse to the study of
Latin, which soon became the official language of the Christian church;
and it was taught everywhere by the priests to the middle and upper
classes, and they also encouraged the masses to learn it. It seemed as
if this was destined to maintain the prestige of Latin as the official
language of the country. But in reality it hastened its downfall by
making it more and more the language of the illiterate masses. Soon the
rural districts furnished priests who spoke their own Roman tongue; and
the struggle to rehabilitate the literary Latin among the masses was
abandoned. The numerous French dialects of Latin had already begun to
assume shape when the decline of the Roman Empire brought the Germanic
tribes down upon Gaul and introduced a new element into the Romanic
speech, which had already worked its will upon the tongue of the
Caesars. Under its influence the loose Latin construction disappea