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The Democratic Republic of the Congo currently has the largest population of any country with French as its official language. [8] According to a 2021 survey, French was the most spoken language in the country: a total of 74% of Congolese (79% of men, and 68% of women) reported using French as a language of communication. [9]
Republic of Congo is a Francophone country, and in 2024, French is spoken by 3,89 million people out of 6,33 million (61.4 %). [2] A 2006 study found that French was spoken by 30% of the Congolese population. [3] According to a study by Omar Massoumou, 88% of those in Brazzaville aged over 15 could write simple phrases in French. [4]
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 50 countries and territories having it as a de jure or de facto official, administrative, or cultural language. [1]
The French Congo was sometimes known as Gabon-Congo. [3] It formally added Gabon on in 1891, [ 1 ] was officially renamed Middle Congo (French: Moyen-Congo ) in 1903, was temporarily divorced from Gabon in 1906, and was then reunited as French Equatorial Africa in 1910 in an attempt to emulate the relative success of French West Africa .
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 ...
A 2021 survey found that 74% of the population could speak French, making it the most widely spoken language in the country. [267] In Kinshasa, 67% of the population in 2014 could read and write French, and 68.5% could speak and understand it. [268] In 2024, there were around 12 million native French speakers in the country. [269]
A man from Labé, Guinea, speaking Pular and West African French. African French (French: français africain) is the generic name of the varieties of the French language spoken by an estimated 320 million people in Africa in 2023 or 67% of the French-speaking population of the world [1] [2] [3] spread across 34 countries and territories.
The official language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, of which Kinshasa is the capital, is French (See: Kinshasa French vocabulary). Kinshasa is the largest officially Francophone city in the world, albeit that the vast majority of people either cannot speak French, or struggle in speaking it.