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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 ...
This is a list of the member states of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.These governments belong to an international organisation representing countries and regions where French is the first ("mother") or customary language, where a significant proportion of the population are francophones (French speakers) or where there is a notable affiliation with French culture.
The 2001 census defines an ethnic group as a "community of people, related to each other by origin and language, and close to each other by mode of life and culture"; and one's mother tongue as "the language a person speaks best and usually uses for communication in the family (household)". [5]
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.
New Caledonia and French Polynesia). Map of the French Diaspora in the World. French Canadian diaspora – includes hundreds of thousands of people who left Quebec for the United States (most went to New England states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont), as well as Ontario and Western Canada, between about 1840 and 1930.
The main aims were to disseminate French culture and the French language and to gain prestige and business for France. Indeed, French became the primary foreign language in Bulgaria and the wealthy typically sent their children to elite Roman Catholic French language schools taught by Frenchmen.
French is an official language in 27 independent nations. French is also the second most geographically widespread language in the world after English, with about 60 countries and territories having it as a de jure or de facto official, administrative, or cultural language. [1]
The majority of the world's French-speaking population lives in Africa. According to a 2023 estimate from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, an estimated 167 million African people spread across 35 countries and territories [b] can speak French as either a first or a second language.