Learn to Speak French

About French

French  is a Romance language talked as a first language in France, the Romandy area in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the province of Quebec, numerous African countries, and the Acadia area in Canada, the north of the U.S. condition of Maine, the Acadiana region of the U.S. say of Louisiana, and by various communities elsewhere. Different speakers of French, who often chat it as a second language, are really distributed throughout many parts of the world, the largest numbers of whom reside in Francophone Africa.

More about French

French is a descendant of the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire, becausan are really dialects really because Italian, Portuguese, Spanish; Romanian, Lombard, Catalan, Sicilian and Sardinian. The nearest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages over the years talked in northern France and Belgium, which French has largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul, and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Now, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, about notably Haitian.

It is a certified language in 29 countries, many of which means la francophonie (in French), the community of French-speaking countries. It is an official language of all United Nations agencies and a big wide range of international organizations. Based on the European Union, 129 million, or twenty-six percentage of the Union's utter number, can chat French, of who 72 million are native speakers (65 million in France, 4.5 million in Belgium, plus 2.5 million in Switzerland, which is not part of the EU) and 69 million are second-language or foreign language speakers, thus creating French the third language in the European Union that people say these are typically most able to speak, after English and German. Twenty portion of non-Francophone Europeans know how to speak French, totaling roughly 145.6 million people in Europe alone. As a outcome of extensive colonial ambitions of France and Belgium (at that time governed by a French-speaking elite), between the 17th and twentieth hundreds of years, French was introduced to the Americas, Africa, Polynesia, the Levant, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.

According to a demographic projection led by the Université Laval and the Réseau Démographie de l'Agence universitaire de la francophonie, French speakers will number approximately 500 million individuals in 2025 and 650 million visitors, or approximately 7% of the world's number by 2050.

The authoritative language of the French Republic is definitely French (art. 2 of the French Constitution) and the French authorities is, by law, compelled to communicate primarily in French. The government, furthermore, mandates that commercial advertising be available in French (though it can also use other dialects); see Toubon Law. The French government, unfortunately, will not mandate the by personalized people or corporations or in any other media.

A revision of the French constitution making official recognition of regional tongues was implemented by the Parliament in Congress at Versailles in July 2008.

written for the government by Bernard Cerquiglini identified 75 languages that would qualify for recognition under the government's proposed ratification of the Western european Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. 24 of those languages are indigenous to the European place of the state while all of the many are from overseas areas of the French Republic (in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Pacific seashore and South America).

Although ratification was clogged by the Constitutional Council as contradicting the Fifth Republic's constitutional provision enshrining French as the language of the Republic, the national continues to recognise regional and minority tongues to a brief extent (i.e. without approving them official status) and the Délégation générale à la langue française has acquired the additional function of observing and studying the languages of France and has now got et aux langues de France added to its title. The category of dialects of France (in French: langues de France) is thus administratively recognised likewise if this does not choose because far as providing any official status. After his election as ceo, François Hollande reasserted in 2012 his campaign platform to ratify the Western european Charter and guaranteed a clear lawful framework for regional languages (within a programme of administrative decentralisation that would give compentencies to the areas in language policy).

The regional languages of France are sometimes called patois, but this term (roughly intending "dialect") is often considered derogatory. Patois is utilized to relate to supposedly strictly mouth tongues, but this does not, for instance, choose into membership that Occitan was already staying written at a time when French was not and its writing has continued to thrive, with a Nobel Prize for Frédéric Mistral in 1904.

At the time of the French movement in 1789 it is estimated that only half of the population of France spoke French, and by 1871 exclusively a quarter spoke French.

The Toubon rules (packed term: law 94-665 of 4 August 1994 relating to usage of the French language), is a rules of the French government mandating the choose of the French language in official government publications, in all commercials, in all workplaces, in commercial contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in all government-financed colleges, and some other contexts.

The law does not concern personalized, non-commercial communications, such as non-commercial internet publications by private bodies. It will not thought products, films, general public speeches, and other forms of communications not constituting commercial activity. However, the law mandates the utilization of the French language in all transmitted audiovisual programs, with exceptions for musical works and 'original version' films. Aired musical works are subject to quota rules under a related law whereby a minimum percentage of the records on radio and tv needs to be within the French language..

The law takes it is common name from Jacques Toubon whom was Minister of Culture after it was passed and who proposed the law to the National Assembly of France. A name is Loi Allgood – "Allgood" is a morpheme-for-morpheme translation of "Toubon" into English ("All Good" being a translation of "Tout bon") – as the legislation can largely be considered to have been enacted in reaction to the increasing usage of English in promotions and other areas in France.

One broad provision of the rulean using to workplaces is that "any document that contains obligations for the worker or provisions whoever knowledge is appropriate for the performance of one’s work needs to be authored in French." Among other things, this signifies that computer software developed outside France must produce its owner interface and instruction instructions translated into French to be legally used by companies in France. The law includes an exception that "these provisions do not employ to documents coming from away from home", but this exception has been interpreted narrowly by the appellate courts. For sample in 2006 a French subsidiary of a US business was given a hefty good for delivering some highly technical documents and software interfaces to its employees in the English language only, and this was upheld by the appellate court.

Another extended provision of the law is the fact that it makes it mandatory for professional commercials and public announcements to be given in French. This does not rule out promotions created in a foreign language: it is sufficient to provide a translation in a footnote. This was justified as a measure for the protection of the consumer. Also, product packaging must become in French, though, again, translation in multiple tongues can feel offered.

A similar limitation, though implemented by primary legislation laws and not as application of the Loi Toubon, applies to product labeling: product labels should be intelligible and in French, though additional languages may be present. Some linguistic restrictions on product labeling were discover to be incompatible with European legislation, really the directives concerning the freedom of motion of goods within the European Union. The French national after that granted interpretation notes and amended regulations in order to comply.

In another provision, the law specifies obligations for public lawful persons (government administrations, et al.), mandating the utilization of French in magazines, or at least in summaries of publications. In France, it is a constitutional requirement that the open should feel informed of the action of the government. Since the official language of France is French, it follows that the French general public should be ready to get official information in French.

Under the Toubon law, schools that do not choose French as the moderate of instruction are really ineligible for government funding. This means the Breton language colleges of Brittany.

Other restrictions thought the utilization of French in academic conferences. These are largely ignored by many public institutions, exclusively within the "hard" scientific fields. The initial restrictions on colloquia additionally used to private bodies, but that was found unconstitutional prior to enactment, on grounds that they violated freedom of message, and the best means of the law was modified accordingly.

African French is definitely the generic term of the varieties of French spoken by an estimated 115 million (2007) people in Africa spread across 31 francophone countries. This includes those who speak French as a initial or second language in these 31 francophone African countries (dark blue on the plan), but it can not offer French speakers residing in non-francophone African countries. Africa is which means that the continent with one particular French speakers in the world. French appeared in Africa as a colonial language. These African French speakers are really right now an important function of the Francophonie.

French is truly mostly a second language in Africa, but in some areas it has become a starting language, these as within the region of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, Libreville, Gabon and in the Island of Réunion. In some countries it is a first language among some classes of the population, such as in Tunisia and Morocco where French is a first language among the upper classes (numerous people in the upper classes are simultaneous bilinguals in Arabic/French), but only a second language among the general population. It was given low by their ancestors, who spoke African French.

In each of the francophone African countries French is spoken with local specificities in conditions of pronunciation and vocabulary.

With regards to of vocabulary, there exist three phenomena in African French. First, the presence of statement which do not exist in standard French. These phrase were either coined locally or borrowed from local African languages. As a result, each regional variety of African French has their individual nearby phrase which are not the same as in other varieties of African French, although this nearby vocabulary only constitutes a small part of the total vocabulary which for one particular part is identical to accepted French. When talking to people from other regions or countries, African French speakers often switch to a more accepted form of French avoiding this local vocabulary. However, there also exists some African French words that are found across numerous African nations (see for example chicotter in the Abidjan French vocabulary section below).

A second phenomenon is the utilization of some words with a meaning different from standard French. For example, the word présentement (which means "at the event" in standard French) is used a whole lot in sub-Saharan Africa (but not in the Maghreb) because of the this means of "as a matter of reality", "as it were" and not "during the moment".

A third phenomenon is truly the variant spoken, especially among the educated and upper classes of sub-Saharan Africa. Educated people there tend to speak a extremely formal type of French which may sound a chunk old-fashioned and conservative to Western european and North American French speakers. This is rather similar to the way The english language is spoken by people of the top lessons in India.

The local African French vocabulary not discover in traditional French range from slang frowned upon by educated people, to colloquial use, to phrase that have entered the formal use (such as chicotter). The French spoken in Abidjan, the largest place of Côte d'Ivoire, offers a good example of these contrasting registers.