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According to the 2007 Adult Education survey, part of a project by the European Union and carried in France by the Insee and based on a sample of 15,350 people, French was the mother tongue of 87.2% of the total population, or roughly 55.81 million people, followed by Arabic (3.6%, 2.3 million), Portuguese (1.5%, 960,000), Spanish (1.2% ...
A language designated as having a unique legal status in the state: typically, the language used in a nation's legislative bodies, and often, official government business. Regional language A language designated as having official status limited to a specific area, administrative division, or territory of the state.
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 following is a list of sovereign states and territories where French is an official or de facto language.
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]
A regional language is a language spoken in a region of a sovereign state, whether it be a small area, a federated state or province or some wider area. Internationally, for the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , " regional or minority languages " means languages that are:
The language belongs to the langues d'oïl subbranch of the Gallo-Romance languages. Some descendants of Poitevin–Saintongeais speakers became the Acadian people of Atlantic Canada as well as the Cajun people of Louisiana. [citation needed] The dialects of this language are peculiar to the historical regions and provinces of Poitou and Saintonge.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a European convention (ETS 148) adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe, ratified and implemented by 25 States, but not by France, as of 2014. The charter contains 98 articles of which ...
The Third Republic sought to modernise France and established primary education where the only language recognised was French. Regional languages were discouraged, and the use of French was seen as aspirational, accelerating their decline. [12] This was also generally the case in areas where Oïl languages were spoken.