About
French
French is
one of the five major Romance languages. It is spoken by 80 million
native speakers and by more than 200,000 million people in the entire
world. There are more than 300 million second-language speakers.
French is widely distributed across the world, in Africa, Europe,
the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. French is an official language
in more than 40 countries and various international organizations,
such as the European Union and the UN.
In Europe,
French is mainly spoken in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
It is also spoken in Monaco, some parts of Italy, and Andorra.
In the Americas,
French is spoken mainly in Canada, where there are more than 7 million
native speakers, an overwhelming majority of whom live in Quebec.
It is also an official language in Haiti, French Guiana, Guadeloupe,
Martinique, Saint Barthelemy, St. Martin, Saint-Pierre, and Miquelon.
In the United
States, French is mainly spoken in Louisiana, Maine, Vermont,
and New Hampshire, and it is considered the fourth most-spoken language
in the country, after English, Spanish, and Chinese.
In Africa,
French is widely spoken on the Western coast. It is an official
language in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African
Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial
Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Mayotte, Reunion, Mauritius,
Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, and Togo. French is also spoken
in northern Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), and is an administrative
language in Mauritania.
In Asia,
French is used as an administrative language in Laos and Lebanon,
and it is spoken in parts of Cambodia, India, Vietnam, and Syria.
French is
also spoken in the Oceania (French Polynesia, Wallis
and Futuna, and New Caledonia).
Reflecting
its wide territorial presence, French has more than 20 regional
varieties, and more than 10 derived languages, including Haitian
Creole and Louisiana Creole French.
Like the other
major Romance languages, French has only two grammatical
genders (feminine and masculine), with the exception of Romanian,
which also has neuter. French also shares with other Romance languages
the formation of compound tenses with the aid of the auxiliary verbs
"to have" and "to be".
The majority
of French words are derived from Vulgar Latin,
but it is estimated that around 12% of a typical dictionary are
drived from foreign words, of which a quarter are of English origin,
followed by Italian and other Germanic languages. Other foreign
words come from Arabic, Slavic languages, Spanish, German, Dutch,
and Asian languages.
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