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ISO 639 is a standardized nomenclature used to classify languages. [1] Each language is assigned a two-letter (set 1) and three-letter lowercase abbreviation (sets 2–5). [ 2 ] Part 1 of the standard, ISO 639-1 defines the two-letter codes, and Part 3 (2007), ISO 639-3 , defines the three-letter codes, aiming to cover all known natural ...
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.
Of Europeans who speak other languages natively, approximately one-fifth are able to speak French as a second language. [23] Many institutions of the EU use French as a working language along with English, German and Italian; in some institutions, French is the sole working language (e.g. at the Court of Justice of the European Union). [24]
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.
The French definite article derives from a Latin distal demonstrative, ille. [1] It evolved from the Old French article system, which shared resemblance to modern English and acquired the marking of generic nouns. [2] This practise was common by the 17th century, although it has been argued that this became widely used as early as in the 13th ...
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% ...
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages . French is a moderately inflected language.