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French is still a lingua franca in most Western and Central African countries and an official language of many, a remnant of French and Belgian colonialism. These African countries and others are members of the Francophonie. French is the official language of the Universal Postal Union, with English added as a working language in 1994. [46
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 color-coded map of most languages used throughout Europe. There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. [1] [2] Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language.
European French (French: français d'Europe, français européen) is the variety of French spoken in Europe in French speaking countries or areas.. In Europe, French is spoken by 71 million native speakers, making French the second most spoken native language in Europe after German and 210 million Europeans can speak French, making French the second most spoken language in Europe after English.
This is a list of European languages by the number of native speakers in Europe only. List. Rank ... French: 81,000,000 [4] 210,000,000 [3] 4
Both aspects of "dialects of a same language" and "French as the common langue d'oïl" appear in a text of Roger Bacon, Opus maius, who wrote in Medieval Latin but translated thus: "Indeed, idioms of a same language vary amongst people, as it occurs in the French language which varies in an idiomatic manner amongst the French, Picards, Normans ...
French, like most European languages, uses a space to separate thousands. [129] The comma (French: virgule) is used in French numbers as a decimal point, i.e. "2,5" instead of "2.5". In the case of currencies, the currency markers are substituted for decimal point, i.e. "5$7" for "5 dollars and 7 cents".
Other than southern Occitano-Romance, the Gallo-Romance languages are quite innovative, with French and some of the Gallo-Italian languages rivalling each other for the most extreme phonological changes compared with more conservative languages. For example, French sain, saint, sein, ceint, seing meaning "healthy, holy, breast, (he) girds ...