• French is spoken in TWO of the G7 countries.
• French is one of the official languages of the United Nations.
• Paris hosts the most international congresses in the world.
• France has the world’s greatest number of Nobel Prize winners in literature. (12)
• France is the world’s major tourist destination.(77 million visited France in 2002).
• Paris is considered the capital of the world in terms of quality of life.
• France is with Germany the main pillar in the European Union.
• France is Europe’s foremost investor abroad.
• France ranks 4^th in terms of world power and it does not have the debt problems facing many other major industrialized nations. (A positive sign for joint projects, business and scientific co-operation).
• France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany have the lowest rates of inflation in the European Union. This is an indicator of the health of these countries.
• France is renowned for the quality of its high-tech.
• French is a major language of high-tech and business in the world.
• Over 20,000 English words have their origin in French.
• In terms of number of words, French is the largest language after English.
• France offers a range of generous scholarships to U.S. graduate students.
• French is the most widely taught second language after English.
• French is the official language of the International Red Cross.
• French is the official language of post offices across the world.
• French is one of the two official languages at the Olympic Games.
• French-speaking Africa represents an area larger than the U.S.A.
• Montréal is the second largest French-Speaking city in the world.
• Le Courrier Australien, founded in 1892, is the oldest ethnic newspaper in Australia.
• Megabucks for trade: In 2000 the United States did business/trade with the following countries in order of importance: 1. French-speaking countries; 2. Japan; 3. Spanish speaking countries.
• A good knowledge of French enables you to fully enjoy at the movie theaters or on TV, the best films from the French-speaking world.
• You can do so many more interesting things on the internet if you speak French. There are many high quality internet sites available in French ranging from society to science, fashion to finance, music to medicine …just to mention a few.
• For those with the appropriate skills there are also possibilities for employment (building a career rather than keeping a job) in the following fields: International business (what other kind of business is there in a global economy?), International agencies, the tourism and hospitality industries, the diplomatic service, French and /or French-speaking research institutes, teaching, translating or interpreting.

French Language & History

French, as it is spoken today by a vast Francophone population, began to become standardized with Charlemagne's conquest of the Gauls and Franks in the 16th Century. The history of the modern French language in France emerged with the combination of Latin and Provençal. Keep reading to learn more.

French language

French is used as the official language of 22 countries and is the co-official language of many several others, including Belgium, Canada, Haiti, Madagascar, and Switzerland. It is spoken as a first language by 60 million people in France and Corsica; in Canada by 7.2 million; in Belgium by 3.3 million; in Switzerland by 1.2 million; in Monaco by 17,000; in Italy  by 100,000; and in the United States by nearly 2 million. In sub-Saharan Africa, some 5 million people (in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, and Zaire) use French as their principal international language, as do additional millions in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). In addition, French continues to be spoken as a second language by many people in countries located along the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean that were once French colonies or territories (notably Algeria. Morocco, and Lebanon).

History of French language

Modern French belongs to the group of "Romance" languages. Descended from Latin, these languages may be said to represent living shadows of the ancient Roman empire, reflecting the divergent histories of regions formerly unified under Roman rule.

The source of modern French (and of the other Romance languages) was a spoken, popular version of the Latin tongue that was spread abroad by conquering Roman legions – namely, in the case of French, to so-called "Transalpine Gaul" by the armies of Julius Caesar during the century that preceded the birth of Christ.

The invasion of Gaul in the 400’s AD by Germanic tribes (including the "Franks") fleeing nomadic attackers from central Asia resulted in a loss of military control by Rome and led to the establishment in of a new, Frankish ruling class whose mother tongue was, of course, not Latin. 

Their adaptation to the speaking of popular Latin by the indigenous population tended to impose, by authoritative example, a pronunciation that retained a marked Germanic flavor – notably in the vowel sounds that can still be heard in the French of the present day (the modern French "u" and "eu", for instance, remain very close to the modern German "ü" and "ö"– sounds unknown to any other modern language descended from Latin).
 

The grammar of the spoken, popular Latin language from which French descended was simpler than that of the Latin known from classical Latin literature. The emergence, over time, of a specifically "French" language from spoken Latin, however, carried the simplification much further.  Much of what Latin communicated by inflectional modification  of words was now communicated by separate words or phrases, and especially by word order (which in Latin had been extremely flexible because logical relations between words could be detected from word endings alone, regardless of word order).

The changes in grammar gradually made it harder and harder for speakers of the current language to understand the Latin language still used in Christian religious services and in legal documents. As a result, a written codification of the evolving spoken language was found necessary for current legal and political use. The earliest written documents in a distinctly "French" ("Francien", from "Frankish") language are the so-called "Oaths of Strasbourg", sworn by two of Charlemagne’s grandsons in 842 AD

This "French" language was in fact one of a number of different languages descended from Latin that were spoken in various parts of post-Roman Gaul. Others included notably the "Provençal" language (or "langue d’oc"), spoken in much of the southern half of what is today metropolitan France. However the so-called "French" language gained a special status resulting from its association with the dominant feudal military power – namely the court of Charlemagne and his successors – whose territorial reach and effective control of French life grew over time.

The return of the French court to Paris – after its move to Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) under Charlemagne -- and the ultimate success of its armies against the Anglo-Norman occupiers of major parts of northern and southwestern France, led to a territorial consolidation that guaranteed the future position of "French" as the official language of a centralized monarchy (later nation-state). French was so established by the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts in the year 1539.

The poetic fertility of medieval Provençal, meanwhile, which had far surpassed that of French, in the so-called "Troubadour" period, now gave way to the literary productivity of the language of the central court and central institutions of justice and learning – the language of Paris and the surrounding Ile-de-France region.

The grammar of the French language spoken and written today is in its essentials unchanged from the late 17th century, when official efforts to standardize, stabilize, and clarify French grammatical usage were institutionalized in the French Academy. The purpose of this standardization was political: to facilitate the extension of the court’s influence and to smooth the processes of law, administration, and commerce throughout and even beyond the territory of France, as colonial ventures (as far away as India and Louisiana) opened new theaters of imperial growth.

Even today, after the decline of French imperial influence, post-World War II, French remains the second language of a vast "Francophone" population extending far beyond France’s remaining overseas territories and dependencies (French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St.-Pierre and Miquelon, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Tahiti, Seychelles, Mauritius, and Réunion Island).