The text in romana lingua is the earliest alphabetic representation of colloquial speech in France. For something like a thousand years a dialect had been spoken in France that lent itself perfectly to notation in Latin characters but was never written.

— abc-pop-mindp. 56–7

Remarkably like the state of the (written Mandarin) Chinese language and its relationship to the vernacular dialects that don't exactly have a written form. Except in the case of Chinese, there is no alphabet to encode sounds with, only characters that already represent words in their own right.