Francization
Francization or Francisation, also known as Frenchification, is the expansion of French language use—either through willful adoption or coercion—by more and more social groups who had not before used the language as a common means of expression in daily life. As a linguistic concept, known usually as gallicization or gallicisation, it is the practice of modifying foreign words, names, and phrases to make them easier to spell, pronounce, or understand in French.
According to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the figure of 220 million Francophones is underestimated because it only counts people who can write, understand and speak French fluently, thus excluding a majority of African French-speaking people, who do not know how to write.
In 2014, a study from the French bank Natixis claimed French will become the world's most-spoken language by 2050. However, critics of the study state that French coexists with other languages in many countries and the study's estimates are prone to exaggeration.
The number of Francophones in the world has been rising substantially since the 1980s. In 1985, there were 106 million Francophones around the world. That number quickly rose to 173.2 million in 1997, 200 million in 2005, 220 million in 2010. and reached 274 million in 2014. Forecasts expect that the number of French speakers in Africa alone will reach 400 million in 2025, 715 million by 2050 and reach 1 billion and 222 million in 2060. The worldwide French-speaking population is expected to quadruple, whereas the world population is predicted to grow by half.
Africa
Africa has 32 French-speaking countries, of which 18 recognized it as an official de jure language. French was also the most widely spoken language in Africa in 2015, however it mainly serves as a lingua franca and second language, and is not spoken as a first language by the majority.However, Nigeria, the most populous country on the continent, is predominantly English speaking.
The Francophone zone of Africa is two times the size of the United States of America.
French was introduced in Africa by France and Belgium during the colonial period. The process of francization continued after the colonial period.
French became the most spoken language in Africa after Arabic and Swahili in 2010. The number of speakers changed very rapidly between 1992 and 2002, with the number of French learners in sub-Saharan Africa increasing by 60.37%, from 22.33 million to 34.56 million people. A similar trend in the Maghreb region is occurring. However, as figures provided by the OIF for the Maghreb region were combined with those of the Middle East, the exact count for the Maghreb countries alone is not possible. In this larger region, an increase from 10.47 million to 18 million people learning French was observed between 1992 and 2002.
Consideration should be given to the number of French speakers in each country to get an idea of the importance the French language holds in African as a second language.
Many African countries without French as an official language have recently joined the OIF:
- Cape Verde
- Egypt
- Ghana
- Guinea-Bissau
- Mozambique
- São Tomé and Príncipe
Francophone African countries counted 370 million inhabitants in 2014. This number is expected to reach between 700 and 750 million by 2050. There are already more francophones in Africa than in Europe.
Asia
, Cambodia and Laos were once part of French Indochina, part of the French Empire. French culture, in aspects of architecture, culinary and linguistics, has been integrated into the local ones, although the latter remained highly distinct. French used to be the official language and was considerably popular and influential in these colonies, but after they were decolonised and gained independence, the new governments generally removed its influence, by implementing the native language as the only official language in the newly independent states. Currently, the presence of the French language in these countries is more minor than before.Europe
England
The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 resulted in the Normans under William the Conquerer gradually supplanting the Anglo-Saxon nobility with a Norman one. During this period, the English language "took a back seat in favor of Franco-Norman", with William imposing the usage of Franco-Norman on official life in England. While inhabitants of the English countryside and most urban dwellers spoke Old English, the new Norman nobility and clergymen spoke Franco-Norman, while clerks and scholars continued to write in Latin. During the early part of the Middle Ages, French acquired a significant level of prestige among England's nobility and became the official language of the English judiciary. Today, it is estimated that 50% to 60% of the English language comes from French or Latin.Cookery gives a good example of this tendency: the names of many farm animals have Anglo-Saxon roots. However, the names of their meat have Old French origins:
- Pig – Pork from the Old French porc
- Cow – Beef from the Old French bœuf
- Chicken – Poultry from the Old French pouletrie or poule
- Sheep – Mutton from the Old French moton
France
With the decline of Latin, French became increasingly important for writing. Often, people were encouraged or compelled to adopt French, thereby developing a French identity at the expense of their existing one. Use of other languages was often suppressed. This occurred, for example, among the Alemannic-speaking inhabitants of Alsace and the Lorraine Franconian-speaking inhabitants of Lorraine after these regions were conquered by Louis XIV during the seventeenth century, to the Flemings in French Flanders, to the Occitans in Occitania, and to Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Corsicans and Niçards. Corsica passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 after the Treaty of Versailles. Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Francization occurred in Corsica, and caused a near-disappearance of the Italian language as many of the Italian speakers in these areas migrated to Italy.
Shortly after the fall of the Ancien Régime, the new revolutionary government adopted a policy of promotion of French as a unifying and modernizing language, simultaneously denigrating the status of minority languages as bulwarks of feudalism, Church control of the state, and backwardness in general. In less than a year after coming to power, the Committee for Public Instruction mandated that the newly expanded public education be fortified by sending French-speaking teachers to areas that spoke other languages. This programme achieved many of its aims during the 19th century: by the 1860s, nearly 80% of the national population could speak French.
File:County of nice.svg|thumbnail|A map of the County of Nice showing the area of the Italian kingdom of Sardinia annexed in 1860 to France. The area in red had already become part of France before 1860.
After the Treaty of Turin was signed in 1860 between the Victor Emmanuel II and Napoleon III as a consequence of the Plombières Agreement, the County of Nice was ceded to France as a territorial reward for French assistance in the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, which saw Lombardy united with Piedmont-Sardinia. The Italian language was the official language of the County of Nice, used by the Church, at the town hall, taught in schools, used in theaters and at the Opera, was immediately abolished and replaced by French. The French government implemented a policy of Francization of society, language and culture of the County of Nice. The toponyms of the communes of the ancient County have been francized, with the obligation to use French in Nice, as well as certain surnames.
By 1900, French had become the mother tongue of the majority of adults in France. Jules Ferry introduced free, compulsory education during the French Third Republic, and openly tried to strengthen the centralised state by instilling a French national identity in the population. French was presented as the language of modernity, as opposed to regional languages such as Breton or Basque, labelled as barbaric or tribal. Pupils caught speaking these languages were punished by making them display tokens of shame. In Occitan-speaking areas that school policy was called the vergonha.
Historically, no official language was recognized by the French Constitution. In 1994, French was declared constitutionally to be the language of the French Republic. In 1998, France became a signatory of the European Charter on Minority Languages; however, it has yet to ratify it, with general agreement among the political class that supportive measures are neither popular enough to attract wide support nor banal enough to be uncontroversial, with concerns specifically about courts forcing the state to act if the rights enshrined in the charter are recognised.
Initiatives to encourage the use of minority languages are limited by the refusal of the French Government to recognize them, on the basis of the French Constitution, which states that "The language of the Republic of France is French". This view was upheld in 2021, when Deputy Paul Molac unexpectedly won a majority vote in the French National Assembly to allow for immersive education in minority languages in state-run schools. The Assembly's decision was immediately contested by the French Constitutional Council, which struck out the parliament's vote. The council also deemed unconstitutional the use of diacritical marks not used in French, such as the tilde in "ñ".