List of French words of Gaulish origin

The Gaulish language, and presumably its many dialects and closely allied sister languages, left a few hundred words in French and many more in nearby Romance languages, i.e. Franco-Provençal (Eastern France and Western Switzerland), Occitan (Southern France), Catalan, Romansch, Gallo-Italic (Northern Italy), and many of the regional languages of northern France and Belgium collectively known as langues d'oïl (e.g. Walloon, Norman, Gallo, Picard, Bourguignon, and Poitevin).

What follows is a non-exhaustive list of inherited French words, past and present, along with words in neighboring or related languages, all borrowed from the Gaulish language (or more precisely from a substrate of Gaulish).

Modern French

A-B

C-G

I-Z

Old French

Regional and neighboring languages

See also

• History of French
• List of Spanish words of Celtic origin
• List of Galician words of Celtic origin
• List of French words of Germanic origin

Bibliography

• Delamarre, Xavier. Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise: Une approche linguistique du vieux-celtique continental, 2nd edn. Paris: Errance, 2003 (1st edn. 2001).
• Deshayes, Albert. Dictionnaire étymologique du breton. Douarnenez, France: Le Chasse-Marée, 2003.
• Dottin, Georges. La langue gauloise: Grammaire, textes et glossaire, preface de François Falc'hun. Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1920 (reprint Geneva, 1985).
• Lambert, Pierre-Yves. La Langue gauloise. Paris: Errance, 1994.
• Savignac, Jean-Paul. Dictionnaire français-gaulois. Paris: La Différence, 2004.
• von Wartburg, Walther. Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. 25 vols. Bonn: Klopp; Heidelberg: Carl Winter; Leipzig–Berlin: Teubner; Basel: R. G. Zbinden, 1922–67.

References