French language
French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-Romance, a descendant of the Latin spoken in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French largely supplanted. It was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul and by the Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, it was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole, were developed. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.
French is an official language in 26 countries, as well as one of the most geographically widespread languages in the world, with speakers in about 50 countries. Most of these countries are members of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the community of 54 member states which share the use or teaching of French. It is estimated to have about 310 million speakers, of which about 74 million are native speakers; it is spoken as a first language in France, Canada, Belgium, western Switzerland, parts of Luxembourg, and Monaco. Meanwhile in Francophone Africa it is spoken mainly as a second language or lingua franca, though it has also become a native language in a small number of urban areas; in some North African countries like Algeria, despite not having official status, it is also a first language among some upper classes of the population alongside the indigenous ones, but only a second one among the general population.
In 2015, approximately 40% of the Francophone population 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 most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union. Of Europeans who speak other languages natively, approximately one-fifth are able to speak French as a second language. Many institutions of the EU use French as a working language along with English, German and Italian; in some institutions, French is the sole working language. French is also the 22nd most natively spoken language in the world, the sixth most spoken language by total number of speakers, and is among the top five most studied languages worldwide, with about 120 million learners as of 2017. French has a long history as an international language of literature and scientific standards and is a primary or second language of many international organizations including the United Nations, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Olympic Committee, the General Conference on Weights and Measures, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
History
French is a Romance language that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France. The language's early forms include Old French and Middle French.Vulgar Latin in Gaul
Due to Roman rule, Latin was gradually adopted by the inhabitants of Gaul. 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 is attested in graffiti. This local variety evolved into the Gallo-Romance tongues, which include French and its closest relatives, such as Franco-Provençal.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. Because few Latin speakers settled in rural areas during Roman times, Latin there held little or no social value for the peasantry; as a result, 90% of the total population of Gaul remained indigenous in origin. The urban aristocracy, who used Latin for trade, education or official uses, would send their children to Roman schools and administered lands for Rome. In the fifth century, at the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the vast majority of the population remained Gaulish speakers. They shifted to Latin as their native speech only one century after the Frankish conquest of Gaul, adopting the prestige language of their urban literate elite. This eventual spread of Latin can be attributed to the social migration from the focus of urban power to village-centred economies and legal serfdom.
The Gaulish language likely survived into the sixth century in France despite considerable Romanization. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French contributing loanwords and calques, sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence, and influences in conjugation and word order. Recent computational studies suggest that early gender shifts may have 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. Known Gaulish loans are skewed toward certain semantic fields, such as plant life, animals, nature, domestic activities, farming and rural units of measure, weapons, and products traded regionally rather than further afield. This semantic distribution has been attributed to peasants being the last to hold onto Gaulish.
Old French
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. A language divide began to grow across the country. The population in the north spoke langue d'oïl while the population in the south spoke langue d'oc. Langue d'oïl grew into what is known as Old French. The period of Old French spanned between the late 8th and mid-14th centuries. Old French shared many characteristics with Latin. For example, Old French made use of different possible word orders just as Latin did because it had a case 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 including the impersonal singular pronoun on, and the name of the language itself.Up until its later stages, Old French, alongside Old Occitan, maintained a relic of the old nominal case system of Latin longer than most other Romance languages, differentiating between an oblique case and a nominative case. The phonology was characterized by heavy syllabic stress, which led to the emergence of various complicated diphthongs such as -eau which would later be leveled to monophthongs.
The earliest evidence of what became Old French can be seen in the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, while Old French literature began to be produced in the eleventh century, with major early works often focusing on the lives of saints, or wars and royal courts, notably including the Chanson de Roland, epic cycles focused on King Arthur and his court, as well as a cycle focused on William of Orange.
During the period of the Crusades French became so dominant in the Mediterranean Sea that it became a lingua franca, and because of increased contact with the Arabs during the Crusades, who referred to them as Franj, numerous Arabic loanwords entered French, such as amiral, alcool, coton and sirop, as well as scientific terms such as algébre, alchimie and zéro.
Middle French
Within Old French many dialects emerged but the Francien dialect is one that not only continued but also thrived during the Middle French period. Modern 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 first Latin-French dictionary, which included information about phonetics, etymology, and grammar. Politically, the first government authority to adopt Modern French as official was the Aosta Valley in 1536, while the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts named French the language of law in the Kingdom of France.Modern French
During the 17th century, French replaced Latin as the most important language of diplomacy and international relations. 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. Stanley Meisler of the Los Angeles Times said that the fact that the Treaty of Versailles was written in English as well as French was the "first diplomatic blow" against the language.During the Grand Siècle, France, under the rule of powerful leaders such as Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV, enjoyed a period of prosperity and prominence among European nations. Richelieu established 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 goal of eradicating the many minorities and regional languages 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 made compulsory, only French was taught and the use of any other 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. Instructions given by a French official to teachers in the department of Finistère, in western Brittany, included the following: "And remember, Gents: you were given your position in order 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 particularly 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.