The Frankish dukedom founded on such a site grew naturally into a kingdom. And along with the establishment of a royal court, the language of the region acquired part of the kingly prestige. Herein we find the explanation of the derivation of the name French from that of Frankish as well as of the language from the local sub-dialect of the Picard patois. Already in the thirteenth century, from this magnificently situated base as a center, both language and nation had absorbed additional territory by a process of steady outward growth. It was French unity in the early making. As early as the twelfth century, no northern nobleman dared appear at the French court without having previously acquired familiarity with its language and manners. The precious literary monuments of this century show that this court language was already known as “François.” A hundred years later, about 1260, French had acquired so much polish and importance that we find Italian writers using it in preference to their own dialects. So in 1298, Marco Polo, a Venetian, gives out the first account of his eastern travels in French, while Brunetto Latini, who was Dante’s tutor, writes his Tesoreto in the same language, explaining his preference by remarking that French “est plus délitaubles languages et plus communs que moult d’autres.”[4] German was to become the language of central Europe. Interposed between the territories of Romanic and Slavic languages, the area of German speech occupies a magnificently commanding position. Originally the language spoken west of the Elbe and Saale rivers, it had advanced considerably to the east in the first century of the Christian era. The imposition of Teutonic language on Slavic populations is one of the results of this ancient expansion of Germanic peoples. During the past thousand years very little change in the distribution of the main German dialects is believed to have taken place. Modern German is generally divided into three sub-branches, Low, High and Middle German. Low German, Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch,[5] the language of the plain, is restricted to the extensive northern lowland. Dialects spoken in the northeastern corner of Rhenish Prussia, Holstein, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Prussia enter into its composition. High German, Oberdeutsch or Hochdeutsch, is the German of the highland. It comprises the Bavarian, Swabian and Alemannic dialects of Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden. Its use as the literary language of all German-speaking people became well established in the Middle Ages. Luther’s translation of the Bible written in Saxonian dialect, a combination of High and Middle German, contributed no mean share to the diffusion of the language. Its use has been favored by Germany’s most noted writers since the seventeenth century. Schools and newspapers tend to convert it eventually into the only speech that will survive within German boundaries.