French is a Romance language spoken by over 260 million people worldwide. It is the fifth most spoken language and the third most spoken Romance language. French is related to other Romance languages and shares much of its vocabulary and grammar with them. It is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn due to cognates and simple grammar. French is widely spoken in Canada, where it is an official language alongside English. It was once considered the language of international learning and culture, but English has replaced it as the lingua franca of science and business. However, French is still considered the language of choice in the arts and is known as the “language of love”.
French is a Romance language spoken worldwide by over 260 million people, making it the fifth most spoken language and the third most spoken of the Romance languages, after Portuguese and Spanish. It has sometimes been considered the “language of the world”, although in recent years English has somewhat supplanted this role. French is an official language in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal , Seychelles, Switzerland, Togo and Vanuatu. It is also widely spoken in many of France’s former territorial possessions, including Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
This language is related to other Romance languages, such as the widely spoken languages Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. It is descended from Latin and as such shares much of its vocabulary and grammar with other languages of Latin derivation. While French is usually not intelligible without study for speakers of other Romance languages, or vice versa, often enough words are cognate to allow a meaning to be inferred.
French is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, due to the large number of cognates and relatively simple grammar. The language strongly influenced English during and after the Norman conquest of England, and as a result English has the most cognates with French of the Romance languages.
Outside of France, French is most widely spoken in Canada. More than 10% of the world’s speakers of this language live in Canada, most of whom reside in the province of Quebec. Due to its widespread use and fairly vocal political groups, French is an official language alongside English in Canada and all products and signs must be printed in both languages. In the province of Quebec, French is the only official language and has had this status since 1974.
For a long time, French has been considered, together with Latin, the language of international learning and numerous scientific articles and journals have been published in this language. It was also seen as the language of culture, and large numbers of writers – even those who spoke English natively – composed great works in French as their primary language. Indeed, the term we use to refer to a language used by a large number of speakers who do not share a mother tongue, lingua franca, simply means “French language”.
Since the emergence of the United States as a global scientific and economic power in the wake of World War II, English has slowly replaced French in many circles as the lingua franca of the scientific and business world, with Chinese and Japanese also emerging rapidly . For many in the art, however, French is still considered the language of choice. It also enjoys a reputation as the “language of love”, due to the perceived softness and lilting nature of its sound. It is often said that poetry feels more natural in French, due to the meter the language tends to follow and the more naturally fitting sentence structures.
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