Challenge: Westerreich

Ah, okay, you got me. Youre right, I should have been less brusk, and I apologise.

As for population numbers or similar - Wellll, its always very easy to look up, say, the most detailed lists of tank types in WW2, but data about the Early Middle Ages... *shrugs* Thats just what Ive always been taught/read, that the Franks in France, the Visigoths in Spain, etc etc. were just absorbed by a far larger population. Of course, the question is, if the Franks were so romanophile, and also so well-organised, why the language barrier between Romance and Germanic did remain more or less the same as during Roman times?

I understand your qualifications about 'German' and 'Germanic' perfectly. As you can attest, I had myself made some reservations about the term 'Westerreich'. The exact use of such a term would be rather unlikely in the scenario I advocated, but not totally implausible. I will explain why.

I have had my school lessons too, and I was told that the Franks came in several waves, and had included among their numbers several other Germanic tribes. You are right when you say that the non-Germanic population was much greater than the Franks themselves. I certainly won't dispute that point. What I wish to argue here is that there were enough ethnic Franks in Northern France to envision the possibility of a Germanic-speaking population in northern France.

What I do not agree with is the case that has been put against the dissimilarity between Anglo-Saxons and Franks. I do not think that the Anglo-Saxons were very numerous, especially in the beginning. They were well-trained warriors, fighting against disorganized Britons with poor military skills.
There is still much debate about their numbers and I will try to provide you wit a relevant paper in my next post.

About your points concerning statistics, I knew that you could not possibly get anything with a clear percentage, but there are historians of populations who try to assess the presence of populations through archeological data and cemeteries, for instance. I think I have some data in my personal library regarding that issue, and I will try to find them so that we can discuss those.

According to the Wikipedia article about the Franks:

"The language spoken by the early Franks is known as Old Frankish and is only attested in a few words in the Lex Salica and in personal names, and is mostly reconstructed from Old Low Franconian and loanwords in Old French and Latin. It evolved eventually in Old Low Franconian, and then into Old Dutch in the Low Countries, while in what is now Germany the Eastern Franconian dialects were slowly replaced from the 14th century by High German. In what became France from the 8th century Frankish was replaced by Old French south of the language border. From the 10th century the language border slowly retreated north to the current border between French and the Germanic languages Dutch and German."

As I gather, there was a lot of cultural and linguistic exchange between what is now France and Germany, and if the Franks had managed, for whatever reason, to assert themselves culturally and linguistically, in the same way as they asserted their political conceptions, then maybe there would have been a state called Westerreich (or something linguistically close to it) in Northern France...
 
Perhaps the Visigoths could unite and remain in Alpine areas of North Italy and Western Austria, forming Visirik.

The remaining Goths settle in the Balkans and Austrian, forming (naturally) the Osterik.

Both forms are later 'corrupted' from the pure Gothic to something approaching the requested names.

This would permit the development of France as in OTL, but we would have a more 'Latin' Spain.
 
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