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French is estimated to have about 76 million native speakers and about million daily, fluent speakers [12] , [1] [13] and another 77 to million secondary speakers who speak it as a second language to varying degrees of proficiency, mainly in Africa. French has a long history as an international language of literature and scientific standards and is a primary or second language of many international organisations including the United Nations , the European Union , the North Atlantic Treaty Organization , the World Trade Organization , the International Olympic Committee , and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In , Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese.
France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education except in specific cases though these dispositions [ clarification needed ] are often ignored and legal contracts ; advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words. In Belgium , French is the official language of Wallonia excluding a part of the East Cantons , which are German-speaking and one of the two official languages—along with Dutch —of the Brussels-Capital Region , where it is spoken by the majority of the population often as their primary language.
French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland along with German , Italian , and Romansh and is spoken in the western part of Switzerland, called Romandy , of which Geneva is the largest city. The language divisions in Switzerland do not coincide with political subdivisions, and some cantons have bilingual status: French is also an official language of Monaco and Luxembourg , as well as in the Aosta Valley region of Italy, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands.
The majority of the world's French-speaking population lives in Africa. According to the report by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, an estimated million African people spread across 31 Francophone countries can speak French as either a first or a second language. French is mostly a second language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan , Ivory Coast [30] and in Libreville , Gabon. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth.
French is the second most common language in Canada , after English , and both are official languages at the federal level. It is the first language of 9. Quebec is also home to the city of Montreal , which is the world's 4th-largest French-speaking city, by number of first language speakers. French is also an official language of all of the territories Northwest Territories , Nunavut , and Yukon. The Act applies to areas of the province where there are significant Francophone communities, namely Eastern Ontario and Northern Ontario.
Smaller pockets of French speakers exist in all other provinces. The city of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, is also effectively bilingual, as it is on the other side of a river from Quebec, opposite the major city of Gatineau, and is required to offer governmental services in French as well as English. According to the United States Census Bureau , French is the fourth [39] most-spoken language in the United States after English , Spanish , and Chinese , when all forms of French are considered together and all dialects of Chinese are similarly combined.
French remains the second most-spoken language in the states of Louisiana , Maine , Vermont and New Hampshire. Louisiana is home to many distinct dialects, collectively known as Louisiana French. According to the United States Census, there are over , people in Louisiana who speak French at home, the most of any state if Creole French is excluded. Missouri French was historically spoken in Missouri and Illinois formerly known as Upper Louisiana , but is nearly extinct today. French is one of Haiti's two official languages. It is the principal language of writing, school instruction, and administrative use.
It is spoken by all educated Haitians and is used in the business sector. It is also used for ceremonial events such as weddings, graduations and church masses. The second official language is the recently standardized Haitian Creole , which virtually the entire population of Haiti speaks. Haitian Creole is one of the French-based creole languages , drawing the large majority of its vocabulary from French, with influences from West African languages, as well as several European languages. French is the official language of both French Guiana on the South American continent, [43] and of Saint Pierre and Miquelon , [44] an archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland in North America.
French was the official language of the colony of French Indochina , comprising modern-day Vietnam , Laos , and Cambodia. It continues to be an administrative language in Laos and Cambodia, although its influence has waned in recent years. After French rule ended, South Vietnam continued to use French in administration, education, and trade. French nevertheless maintains its colonial legacy by being spoken as a second language by the elderly and elite populations and is presently being revived in higher education and continues to be a diplomatic language in Vietnam.
All three countries are official members of the OIF. A former French mandate , Lebanon designates Arabic as the sole official language, while a special law regulates cases when French can be publicly used. Article 11 of Lebanon's Constitution states that "Arabic is the official national language. A law determines the cases in which the French language is to be used". The language is also used on Lebanese pound bank notes, on road signs, on Lebanese license plates , and on official buildings alongside Arabic.
Out of about , students, about , are enrolled in Francophone schools, public or private, in which the teaching of mathematics and scientific subjects is provided in French. One third of high school students educated in French go on to pursue higher education in English-speaking institutions. English is the language of business and communication, with French being an element of social distinction, chosen for its emotional value.
Many secondary schools offer French as a foreign language. The UAE has the status in the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie as an observer state, and Qatar has the status in the organization as an associate state. However, in both countries French is not spoken by almost any of the general population or migrant workers, but spoken by a small minority of those who invest in Francophone countries or have other financial or family ties.
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Their entrance as observer and associate states respectively into the organisation was aided a good deal by their investments into the Organisation and France itself. French is a Romance language meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France. The language's early forms include Old French and Middle French. Due to Roman rule, Latin was gradually adopted by the inhabitants of Gaul, and as the language was learned by the common people it developed a distinct local character, with grammatical differences from Latin as spoken elsewhere, some of which being attested on graffiti.
The Celtic Gaulish language is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France, despite considerable Romanization. The beginning of French in Gaul was greatly influenced by Germanic invasions into the country. These invasions had the greatest impact on the northern part of the country and on the language there. The period of Old French spanned between the 8th and 14th centuries. Old French shared many characteristics with Latin.
For example, Old French made use of all possible word orders just as Latin did. Within Old French many dialects emerged but the Francien dialect is one that not only continued but also thrived during the Middle French period 14th century—17th century. Robert Estienne published the first Latin-French dictionary, which included information about phonetics, etymology, and grammar. During the 17th century, French replaced Latin as the most important language of diplomacy and international relations lingua franca. It retained this role until approximately the middle of the 20th century, when it was replaced by English as the United States became the dominant global power following the Second World War.
By the early s, Parisian French had become the primary language of the aristocracy in France. Near the beginning of the 19th century, the French government began to pursue policies with the end goal of eradicating the many minority and regional languages patois spoken in France. When public education was made compulsory , only French was taught and the use of any other patois language was punished.
The goals of the Public School System were made especially clear to the French speaking teachers sent to teach students in regions such as Occitania and Brittany: Spoken on all continents, [75] French is taught in universities around the world, and is one of the world's most influential languages because of its wide use in the worlds of journalism , jurisprudence , the academy , and diplomacy.
It is the sole internal working language of the Court of Justice of the European Union , and makes with English the European Court of Human Rights 's two working languages. In , George Werber published, in Language Today , a comprehensive academic study entitled "The World's 10 most influential languages". In English-speaking Canada , the United Kingdom , and the Republic of Ireland , French is the first foreign language taught and in number of pupils is far ahead of other languages.
In the United States , Spanish is the most commonly taught foreign language, though French is next. The future of the French language is often discussed in the news. For example, in , The New York Times documented an increase in the teaching of French in New York, especially in dual-language programs where Spanish and Mandarin are offered rather than French as the second language. It noted that French is spreading in areas where the population is rapidly increasing, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Although there are many French regional accents, foreign learners normally use only one variety of the language.
French pronunciation follows strict rules based on spelling, but French spelling is often based more on history than phonology. The rules for pronunciation vary between dialects, but the standard rules are:. Yet, they cannot be changed for "oe" and "ae" in formal and literary texts. French spelling, like English spelling, tends to preserve obsolete pronunciation rules.
This is mainly due to extreme phonetic changes since the Old French period, without a corresponding change in spelling. Moreover, some conscious changes were made to restore Latin orthography as with some English words such as "debt":. French is a morphophonemic language. While it contains graphemes that denote only 36 phonemes , many of its spelling rules are likely due to a consistency in morphemic patterns such as adding suffixes and prefixes. In particular, a given vowel combination or diacritic generally leads to one phoneme. As a result, it can be difficult to predict the spelling of a word based on the sound.
Final consonants are generally silent, except when the following word begins with a vowel see Liaison French. For example, the following words end in a vowel sound: The same words followed by a vowel, however, may sound the consonants, as they do in these examples: French writing, as with any language, is affected by the spoken language. In Old French, the plural for animal was animals. This change was then reflected in the orthography: The us ending, very common in Latin, was then abbreviated by copyists monks by the letter x , resulting in a written form animax.
The same is true for cheval pluralized as chevaux and many others. In addition, castel pl. Some proposals exist to simplify the existing writing system, but they still fail to gather interest.
In , a reform accepted some changes to French orthography. At the time the proposed changes were considered to be suggestions. In , schoolbooks in France began to use the newer recommended spellings, with instruction to teachers that both old and new spellings be deemed correct. French is a moderately inflected language. Nouns and most pronouns are inflected for number singular or plural, though in most nouns the plural is pronounced the same as the singular even if spelled differently ; adjectives , for number and gender masculine or feminine of their nouns; personal pronouns and a few other pronouns, for person , number, gender, and case ; and verbs , for tense , aspect , mood , and the person and number of their subjects.
Case is primarily marked using word order and prepositions , while certain verb features are marked using auxiliary verbs. According to the French lexicogrammatical system, French has a rank-scale hierarchy with clause as the top rank, which is followed by group rank, word rank, and morpheme rank.
A French clause is made up of groups, groups are made up of words, and lastly, words are made up of morphemes. Every French noun is either masculine or feminine. Because French nouns are not inflected for gender, a noun's form cannot specify its gender. For nouns regarding the living, their grammatical genders often correspond to that which they refer to.
Le sieur Bacqueville de La Potherie parle d'un groupe restreint de personnes: French is also an official language of Monaco and Luxembourg , as well as in the Aosta Valley region of Italy, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. We met with Danielle when we first arrived. On estime que leur population pouvait compter au moins individus, mais pouvait aussi atteindre deux millions de personnes. Engerville la gaste Champ a lorry Toury v. L'on commence par les enfants. It noted that French is spreading in areas where the population is rapidly increasing, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
For example, a male teacher is a "enseignant" while a female teacher is a "enseignante. So a group of two male teachers would be "enseignants. The article used for singular nouns is different from that used for plural nouns and the article provides a distinguishing factor between the two in speech. For example, the singular "le professeur" or "la professeur e " the male or female teacher, professor can be distinguished from the plural "les professeurs" because "le," "la," and "les" are all pronounced differently. There are some situations where both the feminine and masculine form of a noun are the same and the article provides the only difference.
For example, "le dentiste" refers to a male dentist while "la dentiste" refers to a female dentist. The French language consists of both finite and non-finite moods. The indicative mood makes use of eight different tense-aspect forms. Some forms are less commonly used today. The subjunctive mood only includes four of the tense-aspect forms found in the indicative: The imperative is used in the present tense with the exception of a few instances where it is used in the perfect tense. French uses both the active voice and the passive voice.
French declarative word order is subject—verb—object although a pronoun object precedes the verb. Specifically, the first translates into "Do you speak French? In many cases a single etymological root appears in French in a "popular" or native form, inherited from Vulgar Latin, and a learned form, borrowed later from Classical Latin.
The following pairs consist of a native noun and a learned adjective:. However, a historical tendency to gallicise Latin roots can be identified, whereas English conversely leans towards a more direct incorporation of the Latin:. It can be difficult to identify the Latin source of native French words, because in the evolution from Vulgar Latin , unstressed syllables were severely reduced and the remaining vowels and consonants underwent significant modifications.
More recently the linguistic policy of the French language academies of France and Quebec has been to provide French equivalents to mainly English imported words, either by using existing vocabulary, extending its meaning or deriving a new word according to French morphological rules. The result is often two or more co-existing terms for describing the same phenomenon. Root languages of loanwords [93]. La Nouvelle-France ne pourra alors que retarder une nouvelle invasion britannique. Le tableau qui suit cf. Voir le tableau complet et la carte en cliquant ICI, sv.
La Normandie, la Bretagne, la Champagne, la Guyenne, la Gascogne, le Languedoc et la Provence sont les provinces qui ont les plus grandes superficies. Il en est ainsi de la Perche: Ce sont plus de sept hommes sur dix et au moins une femme sur deux dans tous les cas. De nouveaux villages apparurent le long du Richelieu et du Saint-Laurent: Les Compagnies franches comptaient aussi des sous-officiers: Elles devaient apprendre comment gagner leur vie honorablement.
Elles restaient dans ces maisons jusqu'au jour de leur mariage. Pierre Boucher parle ainsi des filles du roi: Par la suite, plusieurs se convertirent au catholicisme, dont Champlain. Seuls huguenots furent originaires de France, soit hommes et 40 femmes: The privilege of a permanent residence was granted to none but to Frenchmen professing the Roman Catholic faith.
In this prohibition, religious intolerance pronounced the down of the French colonial system in America. The exclusion of the huguenots from New France, was one of the most stupendous blunders that history records. The repressive policy pursued by the French government for the next fifty years, culminating in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, tended more and more to awaken and to strengthen among the Protestants a disposition to emigrate to foreign lands.
Industrious and thrifty, and anxious at any sacrifice to enjoy the liberty of conscience denied them at home, they would have rejoiced to build up a French state in the New World. No other desirable class of the population of France was inclined for emigration. On peut s'interroger sur l'apport linguistique de ces coureurs des bois et de ces voyageurs. En voici une courte liste: Terme Signification marcher v.
La plupart avaient des relations intimes avec des femmes indiennes. En voici quelques exemples: En , il y en avait dans toutes les Antilles. Au Canada, les esclaves servaient tous comme domestiques. L'Empire britannique abolira finalement l'esclavage en Entre et , seuls 84 individus francophones vinrent dans la colonie du Canada. En France, les faux sauniers faisaient le commerce du sel sans s'acquitter de la taxe, la gabelle.
Par ailleurs, beaucoup de faux sauniers disparurent sans laisser de trace.
On estime que leur population pouvait compter au moins individus, mais pouvait aussi atteindre deux millions de personnes. Dans ce qui est aujourd'hui le Canada, de l'Atlantique au Pacifique, les autochtones devaient atteindre quelque individus. Iroquois , Hurons , Algonquins , Montagnais , Micmacs , etc. Il resterait donc bien peu d'individus d'origine autochtone, probablement moins de 10 individus.
Combien d'enfans que tu t'es acquis. Mohawks , les Onneiouts angl. Onondagas , les Goyogouins angl. Cayugas et les Tsonnontouans angl. En , la variole frappa durement plusieurs tribus. En , ce fut le tour des Iroquois qui moururent par milliers. Ils les trouvaient anormaux parce qu'ils ne couchaient pas avec leurs femmes. Il faut dire que la croix des missionnaires ne faisait pas le poids devant le castor. En , Champlain avait dit aux Hurons: Nous avons eu des Huronnes, des Algonquines, des Iroquoises; celles-ci sont les plus jolies et les plus dociles de toutes.
L'on commence par les enfants. En fait, les premiers efforts de francisation de la part des Indiens leur furent fatals.