earliest

Although this page strives to come up with a list of the first appearances of certain languages, certain facts can not be overlooked. French, for example, is what we imagine people in France speak, yet certainly in the 1800s a large portion were only speaking dialects or patois1 which were not mutually intelligible. By descent, Languedoc is closer to Spanish than French, although centuries on the same side of the Pyrenees undoubtedly moved it closer to French. The domination of French in France began in 1539 with King Francis I , who, in addition to throwing aside a millenium of Latin use in government and replacing it with a law which required all legal documents to be written in the French spoken around Paris. In Germany, it wasn't until the reign of King Frederick II of Prussia in the 1740s that German became the norm in education, or that a particular type of German was commonly used 2 3 . It Italian, it was even later before Latin was replaced on any official basis.

French "the first vernacular document that survives in a precursor to French dates only from 842"4

Spanish "There is a cheese-larder list from a Spanish monastery datable to the late tenth century, preserved because it had been scribbled on the back of a document of donation."5

Italian The number of documents written in the vernacular and dating prior to about 1211, the details of which were collected some years ago by Livio Petrucci, amount to no more than twenty for the entire Italian peninsula.6

Florentine "the earliest documents in the Florentine vernacular is a fragment of a banker's records from 1211"7

Slovenian "Language has alwyas been a vital part of Slovene identity and culture. Slovenes were for centuries under different cultural dominations and the only thing that separated them from neighboring nations was language. Slovene, [is] a South Slavic language written in the Roman (Latin) alphabet[.] ... The earliest written record of Slovene is found in the Freising manuscrips, a collection of confessions and sermons dating from aroudn AD 1000. But in spite of this early record, the language was not generally written until the Reformation, when Protestants translated the Bible (1584), wrote tracts in Slovene, and published the first Slovene grammar and dictionary."8