About French

by Pisith Phlong

Number of speakers
French is a language spoken by approximately 100 million people in the world. It is officially spoken by about 60 million people in France, and about 5 million each in southern Belgium, in Luxembourg, Western Switzerland, Val d’Aosta of Italy and Canada. It used to be an official language of several former French colonies in Africa, and in the Indo-Chinese countries of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In the United States, French is spoken by about 260,000 in Louisiana and 200,000 in New England. (Brown, p. 629; Frawley, p. 42; Strazny, p. 356)

Language group:
French is one of the Gallo-Romance languages. It belongs to the Roman subgroup of the Indo-European language family, along with others such as Occitan and Franco-Provençal in central eastern France. (Brown, p. 629)

History of written language and script
The history of spoken French is traced to the early first century B.C, when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul and brought in Roman speakers of the Vulgar Latin language, which later gave birth to different dialects spoken in ancient France. By the 5th century A.D, Germanic tribes began to invade Gaul and brought with them Gallo-Romance languages which are different from Latin. By the early 9th century A.D, the Council of Tours suggested stopping the usage of Latin because fewer and fewer people could understand the language. (Strazny, p. 358)

Language
The history of the French language is divided into four periods: Old French, Middle French, Classical French and Modern French. 1) Old French, from the 9th to the 14th century, is characterized by the development of Gallo-Roman, with more Germanic influences. In the 9th century A.D, the northern French were more influenced by the Germanic languages while the southern still retained more connection with Latin. As a result, languages in France were divided into two main groups, the Langue d’oïl in the north occupied by the Franks and langue d’oc in the south, with a small group of the franco-provençal in the central eastern part of France. (Bennett, p. 9) The earliest record that marks this period is the Strasbourg oaths in langue d’oïl, dated 843 A.D. From the 10th century A.D onward, French kings began to set up their court in Paris and used the Francien language, a langue d’oïl. Francien became popular and was established as the Parisian form of speech (French). 2) Middle French, from the 14th to the 16th century A.D; the Parisian language continued to be more popular and widely used. According to the royal verdict through the Ordonnances of Viller-Cotterêts in 1539, the Latin was to be replaced by French, and French was promoted as the local language. As a result, in 1549, French was simplified for use and recognized as comparable to Latin and Greek. (Strazny, p. 358) 3) Classical French, from the 17th to 18th century; it is during this time that French became widely used in Europe. In 1635, the French Academy was created to improve the French language and to produce grammar books and dictionaries. By the mid 17th century, French became the international language used in European courts and served as the means of international diplomacy. 4) Modern French, from the 19th century to present; following the laws devised by Jules Ferry and passed in 1881-1886, French was announced to be the sole language for all educational levels and no other curriculum development and languages other than French were allowed. French, since then, became the educational language of France for universal schooling and, in 1992, the French constitution declared French to be ‘the official language of the France’. (Strazny, p. 358-359)

Scripts
Written French was influenced by Latin. Words are formed with combinations of 26 letters in the Latin alphabet (21 consonants and 5 vowels) and some new inventions of symbols such as acute ( ‘ ) and grave ( ` ) to represent the phonographic of French words. (Brown, p. 630) The history of French writing dates back to the 9th century, with the presence of the earliest record of Strasbourg oaths written in langue d’oïl in 843 A.D. (Strazny, p. 358) French borrowed a lot of words from Latin and Greek as well as a number of words from Germanic for its more common vocabulary. (Frawley, p. 46) The 12th century marks the beginning of French literature and many different forms of composition were produced. Some of these earlier literatures are La Chanson de Roland, the verse epic in the early 12th century, Le Chevalier de la charrette (about 1177-1181A.D), and Le Jeu Saint Nicolas (about 1200 A.D). (Bennett, p. 58, 60, 68, 72) In the Middle French period, French language was increasingly studied and a few dictionaries were produced. In 1531, the first bilingual dictionary-Dictionarium seu Latinae Linguae Thesaurus…cum Gallica fere interpretatione (an inventory of the Latin language with translations into French) by Robert Estienne was made and it is followed by the French-Latin dictionary, Dictionaire François-Latin contenant les motz et les manieres de parler François tournez en latin by Robert Estienne in 1539. In 1680, P. Richelet published the first monolingual dictionary, Dictionnaire Français; then in 1690 A. Furetiére published the monolingual dictionary of Dictionnaire Universel. From 1751 to 1780, 35 volumes of the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des science, des arts et des métiers was published by D. Diderot and J. Le Rond d’Alembert. By the Modern period, from the 19th century, more word entries were organized into dictionaries of many volumes, and more information was also added to explain each word. Some dictionaries of this late period are Dictionnaire de la langue française (4 volumes)by Emil Littré in 1863-1873, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (15 volumes) by Pierre Larousse in 1865-1890.  They served as sources for contemporary dictionaries of the late modern French language such as Grand Larousse de la langue française (7 volumes)from 1971 to 1978, and the two dictionaries by Jean Dubois, Dictionnaire du française contemporain in 1966 and Lexis in 1975. It is in the 19th and 20th centuries that French received more loan words from English, some of which were originally borrowed from French during Norman invasion of the Middle English period (11th - 15th centuries) (Brown, p. 638-639)

International expansion of French
The history of French expansion in the world started about the 17th century. Through overseas trade and the colonization, French expanded to North America and the Indian Ocean in the 17th century, Oceania in the 18th century, Asia and some areas of Africa in the 19th century and the early 20th century. Its history in Europe began since the late 17th century until 1919 by serving as the main international language of culture and diplomacy in the courts. (Battye, Hintze, Rowlet, p. 2) During the French colonial period in Southeast Asia, in the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century, French served as an official language in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which formed French Indo-China in 1887. Though, now, the number of French speakers has sharply declined in comparison to English, French is still an important educational language among scholars. (Strazny, p. 358, 359)

Other Dialects
Besides the official French language spoken by the majority, there are a few more dialects spoken in France. They are 1) Roman, including Occitan spoken in the south, Corsican and Catalan spoken in Languedoc-Roussillon region. 2) Germanic languages, including Alsatian spoken in Alsace and part of Lorraine and Flemish spoken in the north near the border with Belgium. 3) Breton, a Celtic language, spoken in the west. 4) Basque, which is a non-Indo-European language, spoken in the southeast along the border with Spain. 5) Franco-Provençal (a mixture between the Langue d’Oïl and the Langue d’Oc), spoken in the central eastern France. (Strazny, p. 354, Brown, p. 629)

Comparison to Western languages
Like other Western languages, French words are formed by consonants and vowels and the sentence structure is arranged in order of Subject-Verb-Object, and also Subject-Object-Verb if the object is replaced by a pronoun. With the influence from the Roman and Germanic languages, French nouns are classified by gender ‘masculine/feminine’; adjectives and articles shows a reflection with nouns regarding number and gender. (Brown, p. 631)

References

• Brown, K. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 4. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier, 2006.
• Frawley, W. J. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 2. (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Strazny, P. Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 1. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
• Bennett. W. A. A History of the French Language through Texts. New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Battye, A., Hintze, M.A., Rowlet, P. The French Language Today: A linguistic Introduction, (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 2000.