French language

French (français) is the third-largest of the Romance languages in terms of number of native speakers, after Spanish and Portuguese. It is spoken by about 175 million people, among whom 115 million "are able to cope with common comunicative situations". French speakers are mainly located in Europe, Canada and Africa. It is an official language in 41 countries, most of which form what is called in French La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations.

Descended from the Latin of the Roman Empire, its development was influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul (particularly in pronunciation), and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. This is one of the reasons why certain French sounds and spellings are distinctly different from those of other Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian and why Spanish and Italian sound more similar to one another than French does to either one of them.

A lingua franca in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, its international role then declined to the benefit of English. It has kept some international recognition however, being one of the two official languages of NATO and IOC, and one of the two working languages of the UN Secretariat.

History

Main article: History of french

This section is not a systematic History of French, its only purpose is briefly to mention some historical events that account for the form of modern French.

By the middle of the first century BCE, the part of Gaul that was to become France was completely conquered by the Romans. Latin, and especially Vulgar Latin (i.e the popular language) progressively replaced the local Gaulish languages. The remnants of Gaulish languages are to be found in some phonological features and in a few words mostly dealing with rural life.

Germanic tribes settled in Gaul during the Migration Period,. The most important, that of the Franks, gave its name to France. Germanic presence in France caused some changes in pronunciation and grammar, especially in the Northern half of Gaul. It evolved into a number of mutually intelligible Oïl languages. Though a variety of dialects remained for long, a common juridical and literary languages arose during the High Middle Ages. By the late 13th century, this common language was called interlingua Gallica (French common language). It progressively extended to Occitan languages-speaking areas in the South of France. By the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 King Francis I made French the official language of administration and court proceedings in France, ousting the Latin, that was still in use in official texts.

In the 16th century, Humanists paid a great interest to vernacular language. It was a period of polylinguism and many tried to enhance French technical accuracy and expressive possibilites by transposing words from dialects and from languages like Italian language, Greek, and above all Latin. In that time of linguistic dynamism, spellings and even vocabulary often changed from one author to the next. The following century was that of the unification of linguistic codes. A significant date is the foundation of the Académie française in 1635. Its aim was to embellish the French language and define a single linguistic model . In 1694, the academy published a dictionnary that ought to define the right usage of words. The 17th century ideal was one of purity and simplicity of expression which was often associated with the French language in the following centuries. French formal language has changed relatively little since that period.

Geographic distribution

See also Dialects of the French language aList of countries where French is an official language and French-based creole languages

Primarily an European language, French has extended to other parts of the world primarily through French colonization. .

Europe

French is the only official language of France and an official language in other regions of Europe, primarily in Belgium and Switzerland.

France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education outside of specific cases (though these dispositions are often ignored) and legal contracts. Since the "Toubon Law" was carried in 1994, advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words. There exists, in addition to French, a variety of languages spoken in France by minorities.

More than 4 millions Belgians -around 40% of the national population- speak French as first language. It is the official language of most of the Walloon Region, while the main language of Flanders is Dutch. French and Dutch are both official languages of the Region of Brussels, the capital city. In the city of Brussels proper, most people speak French.

French is also an official language in Switzerland, where it is spoken by around 1.75 millions, mostly along the French border (Romandy). It also has an official status in less populated areas: It is an official language in Luxembourg, along with German and Luxembourgish and in Val d'Aoste, Italy, along with Italian. It is the official language of the principality of Monaco.

Americas

France lost most of her American colonies through the Treaty of Paris (1763). However French-speaking communities remained, mostly Louisiana and the West Indies, and above all Canada.

French is an official language of Haiti, although it is mostly spoken by the upperclass and well educated while Haitian Creole is more widely used. French is also the official language in France's current possessions of French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Barthelemy, St. Martin, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. It is also an administrative language of Dominica and the U.S. state of Louisiana, where a dialect of French is still spoken by a few people.

French is along with English one of the two official languages of Canada at a federal level, though Provinces may choose their own provincial official tongue. Nearly a quarter of Canadians speak French as mother tongue. French native speakers are mainly located in the Eastern part of the country, epecially in Quebec, where French is the only provincial official tongue and in New Brunswick where it is co-official with English. Due to the geographical distance and close contacts with English as well as a will to ward it off, Canadian French has developed some particularities.

Africa

French is an official language in most countries of the Western half of Africa, with the notable exception of Nigeria. This is to be ascribed to French and Belgian colonizations. French is widely used as a mean of national and international communication, though a great part of the population does not speak it as first language.

French is an official language in 22 African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo (Brazzaville), Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles and Togo. All but Equatorial Guinea were gouverned by France or Belgium at one point.

In addition, French is an administrative language of Mauritania and is commonly understood (though not official) in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Other parts of the world

French is sometimes used in former French Indochina: it is an administrative language in Laos and is used unofficially in parts of Cambodia and Vietnam.

It is unofficially used Lebanon and Syria which were French mandates from 1920 to 1946, and in former French trading posts in India (Mahé, Karikal and Yanam). In Puducherry -also a former French trading post- French has an official is an official language along with the region's de facto Language Tamil.

French is an official language in the French possessions of Mayotte and Réunion both located in the Indian Ocean.

It is also an official language of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, along with France's current possessions of French Polynesia, Wallis & Futuna and New Caledonia.

International Status

French is an official or administrative language in several communities and international organisations (such as the European Union, International Olympic Committee, World Trade Organization, NATO, FINA, FIA, UCI, FIFA, World Anti-Doping Agency, United Nations, African Union, International Court of Justice, IHO, International Secretariat for Water, International Political Science Association, International Bureau of Weights and Measures, European Broadcasting Union, ESA, Universal Postal Union, Interpol and so on) and is among the six official languages of the United Nations and of all its agencies. While the status of French as the leading language for international communication has declined since its peak in the 18th and 19th centuries due to the rise of English, it maintains a prominent position.

Grammar

Main article: French grammar

French grammar shares notable features with most other Romance languages. It is a moderately inflected language. Nouns and most pronouns are inflected for number (singular or plural); adjectives, for the number and gender (masculine or feminine) of their nouns; personal pronouns, for person, number, gender, and case; and verbs, for mood, tense, and the person and number of their subjects. Case is primarily marked using word order and prepositions, and certain verb features are marked using auxiliary verbs.

French word order is Subject Verb Object, except when the object is a pronoun, in which case the word order is Subject Object Verb. Some rare archaisms allow for different word orders.

Vocabulary

The majority of French words derive from vernacular or "vulgar" Latin or were constructed from Latin or Greek roots. There are often pairs of words, one form being popular (noun) and the other one savant (adjective), both originating from Latin. Example:

• brother: frère (brother) / fraternel < from latin FRATER
• finger: doigt / digital < from latin DIGITVS
• faith: foi (faith) / fidèle < from latin FIDES
• cold: froid / frigide < from latin FRIGIDVS
• eye: œil / oculaire < from latin OCVLVS
• the city Saint-Étienne has as inhabitants the Stéphanois

In some examples there is a common word from "vulgar" Latin and a more savant word from classical Latin or even Greek.

• Cheval - Concours équestre - Hippodrome

The French words which have developed from Latin are usually less recognisable than Italian words of Latin origin because as French developed into a separate language from Vulgar Latin, the unstressed final syllable of many words was dropped or elided into the following word.

It is estimated that 12 percent (4,200) of common French words found in a typical dictionary such as the Petit Larousse or Micro-Robert Plus (35,000 words) are of foreign origin. About 25 percent (1,054) of these foreign words come from English and are fairly recent borrowings.

Sound system

Main article: French phonology

Writing system

Main article: French orthography

French is written using the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, plus five diacritics (the circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis, and cedilla) and the two ligatures (œ) and (æ). Some attempts have been made to reform French spelling, but few major changes have been made over the last two centuries.

Sounds, spelling and history

French spelling, like English spelling, is not strictly phonetic. One letter does not correspond to a single phoneme. This is mainly due to changes in pronunciations that did not resulted in changes in spelling. The spelling of some words was also changed in the 16th century without any phonetic justification, to tally with their latin etymons:

• Old French doit > French doigt "finger" (Latin digitum)
• Old French pie > French pied "foot" (Latin pedem)

On the other hand, a given spelling almost always leads to a predictable sound, and the Académie française works to enforce and update this correspondence.

Diacritics and other orthographic particularities

• accents are used sometimes for pronunciation, sometimes to distinguish similar words, and sometimes for etymology alone.
  • Accents that affect pronunciation:
    • The acute accent (l'accent aigu), "é" (e.g., école— school), is pronounced /e/ instead of the defaults /ɛ/ or /ə/,
    • The grave accent (l'accent grave), "è" (e.g., élève— pupil) means that the vowel is pronounced /ɛ/ (as usual),
    • The diaeresis (le tréma) (e.g. naïve— foolish, Noël— Christmas) as in English, specifies that this vowel is pronounced separately from the preceding one (or following one in some cases), not combined,
    • The circumflex (l'accent circonflexe) "ê" (e.g., forêt— forest) shows that an e is pronounced /ɛ/ and that an o is pronounced /o/. It has been used since the late 19th century to replace 's' that were no longer pronounced. Thus, forest became forêt and hospital became hôpital.
  • Accents with no pronunciation effect:
    • The circumflex does not affect the pronunciation of the letters i or u, and in most dialects, a as well. It usually indicates that an s came after it long ago, as in hôtel.
    • All other accents are used only to distinguish similar words, as in the case of distinguishing the adverbs là and où ("there", "where") from the article la and the conjunction ou ("the" fem. sing. , "or") respectively.
• The ligature
  • œ is a mandatory contraction of oe in certain words (sœur "sister" /sœʁ/, œuvre "work [of art]" /œvʁ/, cœur "heart" /kœʁ/, cœlacanthe "coelacanth".
  • The ligature æ is very rare and appears in some words of Latin and Greek origin like ægosome, ægyrine, æschne, cæcum, nævus or uræus. The vowel quality is identical to é /e/.
• cedilla (ç): Indicates that an etymological c is pronounced /s/ when it would otherwise be pronounced /k/. Thus je lance "I throw" (with c = [s] before e), je lançais "I was throwing" (c would be pronounced [k] before a without the cedilla).

Further Reading

Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Douglas Kibbee, Frederic Jenkins, French: A Linguistic Introduction (2006) ISBN 0521821444