French

French, as it is spoken today by a vast Francophone population, began to become standardized with Charlemagne's conquest of the Gauls and Franks in the 16th Century. The history of the modern French language in France emerged with the combination of Latin and Provençal. Keep reading to learn more.

French Language

French is used as the official language of 22 countries and is the co-official language of several others, including Belgium, Canada, Haiti, Madagascar, and Switzerland. It is spoken as a first language by 51 million people in France and Corsica; in Canada by 7.2 million; in Belgium by 3.3 million; in Switzerland by 1.2 million; in Monaco by 17,000; in Italy  by 100,000; and in the United States by nearly 2 million (primarily in Maine and Louisiana). In sub-Saharan Africa, some 5 million people (in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, and Zaire) use French as their principal international language, as do additional millions in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). In addition, French continues to be spoken as a second language by many people in countries located along the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean that were once French colonies or territories (notably Algeria. Morocco, and Lebanon).

History of French Language

Modern French belongs to the group of so-called “Romance” languages. Descended from Latin, these languages may be said to represent living shadows of the ancient Roman empire, reflecting the divergent histories of regions formerly unified under Roman rule.

The source of modern French (and of the other Romance languages) was a spoken, popular version of the Latin tongue that was spread abroad by conquering Roman legions – namely, in the case of French, to so-called “Transalpine Gaul” by the armies of Julius Caesar during the century that preceded the birth of Christ.

The invasion of Gaul in the 400’s AD by Germanic tribes (including the so-called “Franks”) fleeing nomadic attackers from central Asia resulted in a loss of military control by Rome and led to the establishment in of a new, Frankish ruling class whose mother tongue was, of course, not Latin.  Their adaptation to the speaking of popular Latin by the indigenous population tended to impose, by authoritative example, a pronunciation that retained a marked Germanic flavor – notably in the vowel sounds that can still be heard in the French of the present day (the modern French “u” and “eu”, for instance, remain very close to the modern German “ü” and “ö”– sounds unknown to any other modern language descended from Latin).

The changes in grammar gradually made it harder and harder for speakers of the current language to understand the Latin language still used in Christian religious services and in legal documents. As a result, a written codification of the evolving spoken language was found necessary for current legal and political use. The earliest written documents in a distinctly “French” (“Francien”, from “Frankish”) language are the so-called “Oaths of Strasbourg”, sworn by two of Charlemagne’s grandsons in 842 AD

This “French” language was in fact one of a number of different languages descended from Latin that were spoken in various parts of post-Roman Gaul. Others included notably the so-called “Provençal” language (or “langue d’oc”), spoken in much of the southern half of what is today metropolitan France. However the so-called “French” language gained a special status resulting from its association with the dominant feudal military power – namely the court of Charlemagne and his successors – whose territorial reach and effective control of French life grew over time.

The return of the French court to Paris – after its move to Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) under Charlemagne -- and the ultimate success of its armies against the Anglo-Norman occupiers of major parts of northern and southwestern France, led to a territorial consolidation that guaranteed the future position of “French” as the official language of a centralized monarchy (later nation-state). French was so established by the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts in the year 1539.

The poetic fertility of medieval Provençal, meanwhile, which had far surpassed that of French, in the so-called “Troubadour” period, now gave way to the literary productivity of the language of the central court and central institutions of justice and learning – the language of Paris and the surrounding Ile-de-France region.

The grammar of the French language spoken and written today is in its essentials unchanged from the late 17th century, when official efforts to standardize, stabilize, and clarify French grammatical usage were institutionalized in the French Academy. The purpose of this standardization was political: to facilitate the extension of the court’s influence and to smooth the processes of law, administration, and commerce throughout and even beyond the territory of France, as colonial ventures (as far away as India and Louisiana) opened new theaters of imperial growth.

Even today, after the decline of French imperial influence, post-World War II, French remains the second language of a vast “Francophone” population extending far beyond France’s remaining overseas territories and dependencies (French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St.-Pierre and Miquelon, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Tahiti, Seychelles, Mauritius, and Réunion Island).

French in Canada

The French spoken in Canada today, principally in the Province of Quebec,differs from standard modern French as a consequence of Quebec’s political isolation from France after the defeat of French colonial armies by British forces in the Battle of Montreal during the so-called French and Indian War (also called the Seven Years’ War) (1756-1763).

The influence of English on the vocabulary and syntax of Québecquois French has been massive, especially since the introduction of radio and television. Pronunciation differences relative to Parisian French are explained also by the primarily French-Atlantic-coastal origins (largely rural) of many of the 17th-century French colonists of Quebec, whose mother tongue was a non-Parisian dialect of French.

Read more about bilingualism in Canada 

French in Haiti

French is used in Haiti as one of its official languages and as the language of higher education. The popular language spoken in Haiti is a so-called “creole” (a term derived from the Spanish word criolla denoting a person “born in the colonies”). The creole of Haiti is a 17th-century derivative of the language of the French planters who imported captives purchased as slaves from African tribal leaders to work the sugar plantations of France’s then-colony on the island of Hispaniola. The creole represents a grammatically simplified “practical” version of French that arose to fill a need for communication among Afro-Haitians of differing tribal origins whose mother tongues were mutually unintelligible. The pronunciation differences relative to standard French reflect the sounds foreign to French that were present among the African tongues of the original speakers. Haitian creole is today also a written language, and is used as the country’s other official language.

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