French language

French or is the langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France & in southern Belgium, which French Francien largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica as living as by a Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, almost notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking adult or nation may be sent to as Francophone in both English and French.

French is an Francophone regions; Belgium Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region; western Switzerland specifically the cantons forming the Romandy region; parts of Luxembourg; parts of the United States the states of Louisiana, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont; Monaco; the Aosta Valley region of Italy; and various communities elsewhere.

In 2015, about 40% of the francophone population including L2 and partial speakers lived in Europe, 36% in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean, 15% in North Africa and the Middle East, 8% in the Americas, and 1% in Asia and Oceania. French is the second nearly widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union. Of Europeans who speak other languages natively, about one-fifth are a grown-up engaged or qualified in a profession. to speak French as alanguage. French is themost taught foreign Linguistic communication in the EU. any institutions of the EU use French as a working language along with English and German; ininstitutions, French is the sole works language e.g. at the Court of Justice of the European Union. French is also the 18th most natively spoken language in the world, fifth most spoken language by calculation number of speakers and the second or third most studied language worldwide with about 120 million learners as of 2017. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, French was produced to new territories in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, in specific Gabon, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast.

French is estimated to make-up about 76 million native speakers; about 235 million daily, fluent speakers; and another 77–110 million secondary speakers who speak it as a second language to varying degrees of proficiency, mainly in Africa. According to the OIF, approximately 321 million people worldwide are "able to speak the language", without specifying the criteria for this estimation or whom it encompasses. According to a demographic projection led by the Université Laval and the Réseau Démographie de l'Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, the total number of French speakers willapproximately 500 million in 2025 and 650 million by 2050. OIF estimates 700 million by 2050, 80% of whom will be in Africa.

French has a long history as an international language of literature and scientific requirements and is a primary or second language of numerous 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 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese.

History

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. This local manner evolved into the Gallo-Romance tongues, which put French and its closest relatives, such(a) as Arpitan.

The evolution of Latin in Gaul was shaped by its coexistence for over half a millennium beside the native Celtic Gaulish language, which did not go extinct until the late sixth century, long after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. The population remained 90% indigenous in origin; the Romanizing class were the local native elite non Roman settlers, whose children learned Latin in Roman schools. At the time of the collapse of the Empire, this local elite had been slowly abandoning Gaulish entirely, but the rural and lower a collection of things sharing a common attribute populations remained Gaulish speakers who could sometimes also speak Latin or Greek. Thelanguage shift from Gaulish to Vulgar Latin among rural and lower class populations occurred later, when both they and the incoming Frankish ruler/military class adopted the Gallo-Roman Vulgar Latin speech of the urban intellectual elite.

The Gaulish language likely survived into the sixth century in France despite considerable Romanization. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped mark the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French contributing loanwords and calques including oui, the word for "yes", sound earn adjustments to shaped by Gaulish influence, and influences in conjugation and word order. Recent computational studiesthat early gender shifts may clear been motivated by the gender of the corresponding word in Gaulish.

The estimated number of French words that can be attributed to Gaulish is placed at 154 by the Petit Robert, which is often viewed as representing standardized French, while if non-standard dialects are included, the number increases to 240. asked Gaulish loans are skewed towardsemantic fields, such as plant life chêne, bille, etc., animals mouton, etc., nature boue, etc., domestic activities ex. berceau, farming and rural units of measure arpent, lieue, borne, boisseau, weapons, and products traded regionally rather than further afield. This semantic distribution has been attributed to peasants being the last to hold onto Gaulish.

The beginning of French in Gaul was greatly influenced by Germanic invasions into the country. These invasions had the greatest affect on the northern factor of the country and on the language there. A language divide began to grow across the country. The population in the north subjected while the population in the south spoke . Langue d'oïl grew into what is call as Old French. The period of Old French spanned between the 8th and 14th centuries. Old French divided up many characteristics with Latin. For example, Old French made ownership of different possible word orders just as Latin did because it had a effect system that retained the difference between nominative subjects and oblique non-subjects. The period is marked by a heavy superstrate influence from the Germanic Frankish language, which non-exhaustively included the use in upper-class speech and higher registers of V2 word order, a large percentage of the vocabulary now at around 15% of innovative French vocabulary including the impersonal singular pronoun on a calque of Germanic man, and the name of the language itself.

Up until its later stages, ]

The earliest evidence of what became Old French can be seen in the ]

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–17th centuries. sophisticated French grew out of this Francien dialect. Grammatically, during the period of Middle French, noun declensions were lost and there began to be standardized rules. Robert Estienne published the number one Latin-French dictionary, which included information about phonetics, etymology, and grammar. Politically, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts 1539 named French the language of law.

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 to direct or determining following the Second World War. Stanley Meisler of the Los Angeles Times said that the fact that the Treaty of Versailles was written in English as alive as French was the "first diplomatic blow" against the language.

During the Grand Siècle 17th century, France, under the authority of effective leaders such as Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV, enjoyed a period of prosperity and prominence among European nations. Richelieu develop the Académie française to protect the French language. By the early 1800s, 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 intention of eradicating the many minorities and regional languages patois spoken in France. This began in 1794 with Henri Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the use of the French language". When public education was introduced compulsory, only French was taught and the use of all other patois language was punished. The goals of the Public School System were made particularly clear to the French-speaking teachers sent to teach students in regions such as Occitania and Brittany. Instructions assumption by a French official to teachers in the department of Finistère, in western Brittany, included the following: "And remember, Gents: you were assumption your position in layout to kill the Breton language". The prefect of Basses-Pyrénées in the French Basque Country wrote in 1846: "Our schools in the Basque Country are especially meant to replace the Basque language with French..." Students were taught that their ancestral languages were inferior and they should be ashamed of them; this process was known in the Occitan-speaking region as Vergonha.