Learn French

Learn French and open up opportunities for communication with approximately 300 million people across 54 countries.

French is the official language in 41 countries, and a common second language in 13 more, most of which form what is called in French, La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations. French as a foreign language is the second most frequently taught language in the world after English.

Having served as an international language in diplomacy and commerce during the last few centuries, it still enjoys great prestige culturally and is one of the languages used officially by the United Nations.

French is an official language of the African Union, the European Broadcasting Union, ESA, the European Union, FIA, FIFA, ICUP, FINA, IHO, the Council of Europe, the International Political Science Association, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the International Court of Justice, the International Olympic Committee, the International Secretariat for Water, Interpol, NATO, the UCI, the United Nations and all its agencies (including the Universal Postal Union), the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the World Trade Organization. French is also considered to be the most used language in the European Commission along with English.

French Language History

French is descended from Vulgar Latin, the vernacular Latin (as distinguished from literary Latin) of the Roman Empire. When ancient Gaul (now modern France) was conquered by the Romans in the 2nd and 1st centuries AD, its inhabitants spoke Gaulish, a Celtic language, which was rapidly supplanted by the Latin of the Roman overlords. In the 5th century, the Franks, a group of Germanic tribes, began their invasion of Gaul, but they too became romanized. Although modern French inherited several hundred words of Celtic origin and several hundred others from Germanic, it owes its structure and the greater part of its vocabulary to Latin.

By the 9th century the language spoken in France was very different to Latin. It is known as Old French and was in use from the 9th to the 13th centuries. The earliest text in Old French is the Oaths of Strasbourg from 842. From the variety of dialects of Old French, Francien (the north-central dialect spoken in Paris and the region around it) became the standard form of the language due to the increasing political and cultural importance of Paris. From the 14th to the 16th century, French was known as Middle French. During this period many words and expressions were borrowed from Latin, Greek, and Italian, and a group of French poets, the Pléiade, encouraged the French to develop and improve their language and literature.

It was during the 17th century that the modern French began. The French Academy was founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 to maintain the purity of the language and its literature and to serve as the ultimate judge of approved usage. While the vocabulary and style of Modern French were influenced by movements such as romanticism and realism, structurally, French has seen little change since the Middle French period.

French Language Features

Phonetically distinctive French sounds are the nasal vowels and the uvular r. Three accents over vowels are employed: the acute (´) over e, the grave (`) over a and e, and the circumflex (ˆ) over a, e, i, o, and u. An accent indicates the pronunciation of the vowel, distinguishes homonyms, or marks the discarding of the letter s from a word. If a cedilla is placed under the letter c (ç), it signals that the c is to be pronounced as s. Normally, c is pronounced as k before a, o, u, or a consonant and as s before e and i.

The Roman alphabet is used in written French. The spelling of French words, which use many silent letters, is not always a reliable guide to pronunciation. An example is that final consonants are generally not sounded, especially an s or x added to the end of a noun to form the plural. In such a case, the plural number is actually indicated in speech by the form of the article, as in le garçon (lgärsôN´) [the boy] and les garçons (la gärsôN´) [the boys].

French Language Facts

According to the Ethnologue Report, French was the 11th most common first language in the world, with 77 million first language speakers and another 51 million second language speakers in 1999.

Also in 1999, 100-110 million students of all ages, not living in a francophone country, have learned or are learning French in order to communicate with Francophone’s.

French and English are the only languages spoken as a native language on 5 continents and the only languages taught in them. French is the second most commonly-taught second language in the world (after English).

Learning French will not only allow you to function in the language, but to also compete effectively in the global economy of the future.

By learning French, you can become a part of communications and transactions occurring daily in French on every continent.

Click below to learn about French courses in French speaking countries.

The content of this page is original and is copyright of Languages in Action. It has been researched and adapted from several respected sources of French language information such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language.