I'm listening to 'Thor's Angel's' by Dan Carlin, after listening to Punic Nightmare (essentially 100BC-1000AD). Apparently, France was controlled first by the Gauls, then by the Romans, and then the Franks.
Apparently, the Franks were proto-Germans. How did they become what we know as the French- a totally different linguistic group?
because, contrarily to the romans, the Franks did not colonize the land, they just ruled it: only soldiers and rulers settled in France and they got married to local women who spoke Gallo-roman. In the northern area of what is now France it had some influence on the romance language, on its phonology and on its lexicon (about 15% of modern French words come from the language of the franks) but the children of the Franks in France tended to speak the language of their mother. On top of that, Latin remained the language of culture and prestige, and the only language of the Christian faith which the first "king of the Franks" in France converted to when he was made king. The names French and France came from the name of the ruling ethny although there assimilated very quickly in the roman culture and language.
Nowadays, French is the less roman sounding language among all the others like Italian or Spanish, as we share a lot of voyel sounds with germanic languages. (like the /y/ or the /ΓΈ/ sounds)