What is Paris Conversations?

The Paris Conversations, Pariser Gespräche, or Altdeutsche Gespräche are an eleventh-century phrasebook for Romance-speakers needing to communicate in spoken German. The text takes its name from the modern location of the sole surviving manuscript: according to Herbert Penzl, the text survives in the margins of a tenth-century manuscript of unrelated texts, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 7641. The language is a colloquial north-western dialect of German, providing valuable evidence for everyday spoken German.

While in some ways a practical text useful to a cleric or aristocrat traveling in the German-speaking world, the text is also humorous, containing insults and envisaging scenarios like skipping church services to have sex.