French (language)

French ( or ) 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 ( Francien) 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 established. 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 about 50 countries and territories having it as a ''de jure'' or '' de facto'' official, administrative, or cultural language. Most of these countries are members of the (OIF), the community of 54 member states which share the official use or teaching of French. It is estimated to have about 310 million speakers, of which about 80 million are native speakers; it is spoken as a first language (in descending order of the number of speakers) in France, Canada ( provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick), Belgium (Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region), western Switzerland ( Romandy region), parts of Luxembourg, parts of the United States (Louisiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont), Monaco, the Aosta Valley region of Italy, and various communities elsewhere.

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, 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 (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 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 (e.g. at the Court of Justice of the European Union). French is also the 16th 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 organisations 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 (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.

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 languages, 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 (predominantly rural) 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 (including , the word for "yes"), sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence, Celtic influences on French discussed in pages 64–67. Page 65:"In recent years the primary role of the substratum... has been disputed. Best documented is the CT- > ''it'' change which is found in all Western Romania... more reservations have been expressed about... ū > .."; :"Summary on page 67: "There can be no doubt that the way French stands out from the other Western Romance languages (Vidos 1956: 363) is largely due to the intensity of its Celtic substratum, compared with lateral areas like Iberia and Venetia..." 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 (''chêne'', ''bille'', etc.), animals (''mouton'', ''cheval'', 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.

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 while the population in the south spoke . Langue d'oïl grew into what is known as Old French. The period of Old French spanned between the late 8th [2-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it was deemed no longer make to think of the varieties spoken in Gaul as Latin. Although a precise date can't be given, there is a general consensus (see Wright 1982, 1991, Lodge 1993) that an awareness of a vernacular, distinct from Latin, emerged at the end of the eighth century.] 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 Old French#Nouns, 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 (now at around 15% of modern 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, Old French, alongside Old Occitan, maintained a relic of the old nominal case system of Latin longer than most other Romance languages (with the notable exception of Romanian which still currently maintains a case distinction), 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 (such as the ''Vie de Saint Alexis''), 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'' ("Frankish language"), 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'' (admiral), ''alcool'' (alcohol), ''coton'' (cotton) and ''sirop'' (syrop), as well as scientific terms such as ''algébre'' (algebra), ''alchimie'' (alchemy) and ''zéro'' (zero).

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 (14th–17th centuries). 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 (1539) 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 (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.The World's 10 Most Influential Languages
. ''Top Languages''. Retrieved 11 April 2011. 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 (17th century), 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 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 ('' 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 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. Instructions given by a French official to teachers in the department of Finistère

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