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FRENCH LANGUAGE

"French is an official language of 33 countries, most of which form what is called in French, La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations"

You have decided to learn French in France, so some background to the development of this beautiful, widely spoken language is important! Learning French opens up doorways to understanding and appreciating many diverse French speaking cultures throughout the world.

French is an official language of 33 countries, most of which form what is called in French, La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations. It is the native language of 118 million people and spoken as a second or third language by 180 to 260 million people. Most native speakers of the language live in France and the remainder mostly live in Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Francophone Africa, Monaco, Luxembourg and the United States. French is the official language of the international postal service, the Red Cross and one of the two official languages of the Olympic games, and one of the five official languages of the United Nations.

According to the European Union, 129 million people (26%) in 27 member states speak French, of which 59 million (12%) are native speakers and 69 million (14%) speak it as a second language. This makes French the third most spoken second language in the EU, after English and German. French is the ninth most-widely spoken language in the world, spoken in over 43 countries, and the second most commonly taught second language (after English).

French is one of the Romance languages, a group of closely related vernaculars descended from the Latin language of the Roman Empire. The other Romance languages are Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Romanian. The designation Romance is derived from the Latin phrase romanica loqui, "to speak in Roman fashion," which attests to the popular, rather than literary, origins of the languages.

The development of French was also influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders.

The history of the French Language is the history of the emergence and standardisation of a particular variety of northern French and its spread to the whole of France and beyond.

Prehistory of the French Language

At the time of the Roman conquest of Gaul, it was inhabited by a multitude of different tribes who spoke various related Celtic languages. The Romans referred to these people as Gauls. They were Indo-Europeans, related to the Greek, Roman and Germanic peoples in culture and language. Living originally in central or eastern Europe, they began to move westwards around 500 BC and settled in Gaul two hundred years later, displacing the Iberians towards the south-east. By this time there were also important Greek settlements on the Mediterranean coast at Marseille, Nice and Antibes, which retain their Greek names. Although the French often refer to their descent from Gallic ancestors (nos ancêtres les Gaulois), perhaps fewer than 200 words with a Celtic etymology remain in French today.

 

In the second century BC the Greek settlers, harassed by the Gauls, asked for a Roman campaign in Gaul. This campaign, spread over thirty years from 154 to 125 BC, led to the conquest of what the Romans then called the Provincia, a name which survives today as Provence. This Roman colony extended from the Alps to the Rhône, to the eastern Pyrénées. In 57 BC, Julius Caesar undertook the conquest of the rest of Gaul, a process virtually complete by 52 BC.

In the newly conquered territory, Gauls of any rank who had anything to do with administration and supply had an incentive to learn Latin, which quickly became a lingua franca across the entire Gallic region for mercantile, official and educational reasons. Yet this was Vulgar Latin, a completely oral form of the language, with its own grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation patterns that was spoken by the soldiers, merchants, and colonists, and not the careful, cultivated form of Latin used in the Roman Senate and in literature.

Still, Latinisation was a very gradual process and it was probable that in the second or third century AD, in areas remote from Roman supply routes, Latin was seldom heard and even more seldom understood. Gaulish would have remained the normal language used and seems to have lingered on in places until as late as the fifth century.

Discover the full history of the French language >>>>

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