Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The French language became an international language, the second international language alongside Latin, in the Middle Ages, "from the fourteenth century onwards".It was not by virtue of the power of the Kingdom of France: '"... until the end of the fifteenth century, the French of the chancellery spread as a political and literary language because the French court was the model of chivalric ...
French Flemish (Fransch vlaemsch, Standard Dutch: Frans-Vlaams, French: flamand français) is a West Flemish dialect spoken in the north of contemporary France.. Place names attest to Flemish having been spoken since the 8th century in the part of Flanders that was ceded to France at the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, and which hence became known as French Flanders.
The Francophonie or Francophone world is the whole body of people and organisations around the world who use the French language regularly for private or public purposes. The term was coined by Onésime Reclus [ 1 ] in 1880 and became important as part of the conceptual rethinking of cultures and geography in the late 20th century.
His criteria were the numbers of native speakers, the number of secondary speakers (especially high for French among fellow world languages), the number of countries using the language and their respective populations, the economic power of the countries using the language, the number of major areas in which the language is used, and the ...
For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
The Indo-European languages include some 449 (SIL estimate, 2018 edition [1]) languages spoken by about 3.5 billion people or more (roughly half of the world population). Most of the major languages belonging to language branches and groups in Europe , and western and southern Asia , belong to the Indo-European language family .
These French Creoles held a distinct ethno-cultural identity, a shared antique language, Creole French, and their civilization owed its existence to the overseas expansion of the French Empire. [ 1 ] In the eighteenth century, Creole French was the first and native language of many different peoples including those of European origin in the ...
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]