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French phonology is the sound system of French.This article discusses mainly the phonology of all the varieties of Standard French.Notable phonological features include the uvular r present in some accents, nasal vowels, and three processes affecting word-final sounds:
Most other Romance languages are significantly more conservative phonetically, with Spanish, Italian, and especially Sardinian showing the most conservatism, and Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and Occitan showing moderate conservatism. [1] French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language ...
At a regional level, French is acknowledged as an official language in the Aosta Valley region of Italy (the first government authority to adopt Modern French as the official language in 1536, three years before France itself), [60] in which is spoken as a first language by 1.25% of the population and as a second one by approximately 50%. [61]
French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language.It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100 –1200 AD, and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years.
French is an administrative language and is commonly but unofficially used in the Maghreb states, Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.As of 2023, an estimated 350 million African people spread across 34 African countries can speak French either as a first or second language, mostly as a secondary language, making Africa the continent with the most French speakers in the world. [2]
List of languages Language Language family Phonemes Notes Ref Total Consonants Vowels, [clarification needed] tones and stress Arabic (Standard) Afroasiatic: 34: 28 6 Number of phonemes in Modern Standard Arabic, without counting the long vowels /eː/ and /oː/ which are phonemic in Mashriqi dialects or other dialectal phonemes.
In French and Italian, the distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables. Standard Italian more or less maintains this. In French, /e/ and /ɛ/ merged by the twelfth century or so, and the distinction between /ɔ/ and /o/ was eliminated without merging by the sound changes /u/ > /y/, /o/ > /u/.
French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...