It continues to be an administrative language in Laos and Cambodia, although its influence has waned in recent years. As a result, it can be difficult to predict the spelling of a word based on the sound. The word for The in French is either La, Le or Les depending on what you are talking about. The active voice is unmarked while the passive voice is formed by using a form of verb être ("to be") and the past participle. [103], French is a moderately inflected language. [20] This local variety evolved into the Gallo-Romance tongues, which include French and its closest relatives, such as Arpitan. French (français [fʁɑ̃sɛ] or langue française [lɑ̃ɡ fʁɑ̃sɛːz]) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. The language's early forms include Old French and Middle French. French and Latin make up the largest portion of English core vocabulary. [98] Additionally, there are many variations in the pronunciation of consonants at the end of words, demonstrated by how the x in paix is not pronounced though at the end of Aix it is. During the Grand Siècle (17th century), France, under the rule of powerful leaders such as Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV, enjoyed a period of prosperity and prominence among European nations. There are a maximum of 17 vowels in French, not all of which are used in every dialect: French has three pairs of homorganic fricatives distinguished by voicing, i.e., labiodental, French has one rhotic whose pronunciation varies considerably among speakers and phonetic contexts. At the regional level, French is the sole official language of Wallonia (excluding a part of the East Cantons, which are German-speaking) and one of the two official languages—along with Dutch—of the Brussels-Capital Region, where it is spoken by the majority of the population (approx. French also uses verb–object–subject (VOS) and object–subject–verb (OSV) word order. [71] In colonial Vietnam, the elites primarily spoke French, while many servants who worked in French households spoke a French pidgin known as "Tây Bồi" (now extinct). So, whether we count inflected forms will have a huge influence on final counts. The rules for pronunciation vary between dialects, but the standard rules are: French is written with the 26 letters of the basic Latin script, with four diacritics appearing on vowels (circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis) and the cedilla appearing in "ç". Why? Nouns and most pronouns are inflected for number (singular or plural, though in most nouns the plural is pronounced the same as the singular even if spelled differently); adjectives, for number and gender (masculine or feminine) of their nouns; personal pronouns and a few other pronouns, for person, number, gender, and case; and verbs, for tense, aspect, mood, and the person and number of their subjects. Louisiana is home to many distinct dialects, collectively known as Louisiana French. The Act applies to areas of the province where there are significant Francophone communities, namely Eastern Ontario and Northern Ontario. A major world language, French is an official language in 29 countries across multiple continents,[5] most of which are members of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), the community of 84 countries which share the official use or teaching of French. châteaux. The Data Suggests It Could Be...French", https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20191017-eu-after-brexit-will-the-french-language-make-a-comeback-1, "These are the most powerful languages in the world", The World's 10 most influential languages, "Foreign languages 'shortfall' for business, CBI says", "Johnson: What is a foreign language worth? It's important that you practice the French words as much as possible and try to incorporate them into sentences. Given how much French has influenced English, you wouldn’t think that some words going the other way would be newsworthy. [30] Grammatically, during the period of Middle French, noun declensions were lost and there began to be standardized rules. A significant French-speaking community is also present in Israel, primarily among the communities of French Jews in Israel, Moroccan Jews in Israel and Lebanese Jews. [83][85], The future of the French language is often discussed in the news. Some languages inflect much less. In some languages, long words are built from short words, for instance, the Germa… A French clause is made up of groups, groups are made up of words, and lastly, words are made up of morphemes. I feel that this is a realistic number. About 25% (1,054) of these foreign words come from English and are fairly recent borrowings. One recent example, heard in a business context, is “ une to-do liste" , which appears to have entered the French language in around 2007. These include the present (présent), the simple past (passé composé and passé simple), the past imperfective (imparfait), the pluperfect (plus-que-parfait), the simple future (futur simple), the future perfect (futur antérieur), and the past perfect (passé antérieur). About one-third of all English words are derived directly or indirectly from French, and it's estimated that English speakers who have never studied French already know 15,000 French words. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. It's important that you practice the French words as much as possible and try to incorporate them into sentences. More recently[when?] French is mostly a second language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast[55] and in Libreville, Gabon. Here are 31 French words in English that we use all the time. Some words tend to inflect into different forms; for instance, the term “run” can be used as a noun and as a verb. Hopefully you have learned more French vocabulary to take with you after you have visited each of these pages. Of course, things become even more complicated when you take into account slang words within the French language. [76] Actual usage of French varies depending on the region and social status. [105], One study analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin estimated that among the languages analyzed French has the greatest distance from Latin. Quebec is also home to the city of Montreal, which is the world's 4th-largest French-speaking city, by number of first language speakers. [94] His criteria were the numbers of native speakers, the number of secondary speakers (especially high for French among fellow world languages), the number of countries using the language and their respective populations, the economic power of the countries using the language, the number of major areas in which the language is used, and the linguistic prestige associated with the mastery of the language (Werber highlighted that French in particular enjoys considerable linguistic prestige). However, there is not a one-to-one relation of a phoneme and a single related grapheme, which can be seen in how tomber and tombé both end with the /e/ phoneme. For children, adults and EFL/ESL learners. That’s a lot, right?! Building a foundation in French with these words can help you become fluent in French … Usually somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 words. French remains the second most-spoken language in the states of Louisiana, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. Most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, in particular Gabon, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast. The real language policy started in 1966 when a special committee was created to defend the French language and in 1973 it was named High Committee of the French language. (Although stressed syllables are a couple of nanoseconds longer). So a group of two male teachers would be "enseignants". In the United States, Spanish is the most commonly taught foreign language in schools and universities, though French is next. Richelieu established the Académie française to protect the French language. appear in almost every French sentence, much like the English “a”, “the”, or “of”. French is the official language of both French Guiana on the South American continent,[68] and of Saint Pierre and Miquelon,[69] an archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland in North America. French spelling, like English spelling, tends to preserve obsolete pronunciation rules. 33 (2004): 201-222. All rights reserved. There are around 130,000 words in French. Dans beaucoup de pays francophones, surtout sur le continent africain, une proportion importante de la population ne parle pas couramment le français (même s'il est souvent la langue officielle du pays). A “typical person” knows about 70,000 words. Now, since we figured out the categories, let’s jump on the findings of the study: As a future diplomat, you will have to spend aproximately 600-700 hours in Federal Service Institute to reach working proficiency in any language from the first category . In Belgium, French is an official language at the federal level along with Dutch and German. The conditional makes use of the present (présent) and the past (passé). About 220 million people speak French as a native or a second language. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. Rev. Words like “ le shopping" or “ un parking" or “ le hard discount" are now so well established in modern French that many French speakers do not even realise that they are borrowed from English. [13], French is estimated to have about 76 million native speakers; about 235 million daily, fluent speakers;[14][1][15] and another 77–110 million secondary speakers who speak it as a second language to varying degrees of proficiency, mainly in Africa. Luckily, except for a few words here and there, almost all French words will follow certain patterns and rules. A law determines the cases in which the French language is to be used". The Impact of French on English: Language of the Ruling Classes. [87], In the European Union, French was once the dominant language within all institutions until the 1990s. At a regional level, French is acknowledged as official language in the Aosta Valley region of Italy where it is the first language of approximately 30% of the population, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. The French word for 80 is quatre-vingts, literally "four twenties", and the word for 75 is soixante-quinze, literally "sixty-fifteen". To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries.� A few lines later, after having added a few types of words (technical terms and such) they conclude by �a quarter of a million distinct English words�. The literal English translations are "Do you speak French?" "[94], Knowledge of French is often considered to be a useful skill by business owners in the United Kingdom; a 2014 study found that 50% of British managers considered French to be a valuable asset for their business, thus ranking French as the most sought-after foreign language there, ahead of German (49%) and Spanish (44%). "Le français, langue en évolution. At the time of the collapse of the Empire, this local elite had been slowly abandoning Gaulish entirely, but the rural and lower class populations remained Gaulish speakers who could sometimes also speak Latin or Greek. In today's spoken French, the passé composé is used while the passé simple is reserved for formal situations or for literary purposes. First, let’s look at how many words are in the Dictionary. the linguistic policy of the French language academies of France and Quebec has been to provide French equivalents[106] to (mainly English) imported words, either by using existing vocabulary, extending its meaning or deriving a new word according to French morphological rules. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Even native speakers don’t know all the words in their dictionary. [97] Many given spellings of common morphemes usually lead to a predictable sound. This French vocabulary is found in every domain, from government and law to art and literature. If you’ve ever marveled (or laughed!) Nearly 30% of all English words come directly or indirectly from French. OIF synthèse français " [archive] [PDF], Francophonie. Article 11 of Lebanon's Constitution states that "Arabic is the official national language. [16] According to the OIF, approximately 300 million people worldwide are "able to speak the language",[17] without specifying the criteria for this estimation or whom it encompasses. For example, "le dentiste" refers to a male dentist while "la dentiste" refers to a female dentist. According to the French dictionary Larousse, there are approximately 130,000 words in the French language—but you do not have to know all of them! Many words like le, la, les, de, etc. At the time the proposed changes were considered to be suggestions. Page 4. While that may seem a bit intimidating (over 200,000 words! [31] The period is marked by a heavy superstrate influence from the Germanic Frankish language, which non-exhaustively included the use in upper-class speech and higher registers of V2 word order,[32] a large percentage of the vocabulary (now at around 15% of modern French vocabulary [33]) including the impersonal singular pronoun on (a calque of Germanic man), and the name of the language itself. The “million” number also, according to Dr. Crowley, includes the many, many words that have fallen out of usage throughout the time people have been speaking modern English. When public education was made compulsory, only French was taught and the use of any other (patois) language was punished. Does that make Spanish richer in word count? This is why focusing on just the most common words in a language, as you are doing, is a common tactic for language learners. A group of two male teachers and two female teachers would still be "enseignants". In 2016, schoolbooks in France began to use the newer recommended spellings, with instruction to teachers that both old and new spellings be deemed correct. Included in such English language lists are tons and tons of scientific words that many of us don’t know but, of course, still qualify as words. A former French mandate, Lebanon designates Arabic as the sole official language, while a special law regulates cases when French can be publicly used. Missouri French was historically spoken in Missouri and Illinois (formerly known as Upper Louisiana), but is nearly extinct today. [9] Of Europeans who speak other languages natively, approximately one-fifth are able to speak French as a second language. (Don't check boxes for words you know you've However, plural nouns that refer to a group that includes both masculine and feminine entities are always masculine. Standardized rules may become `` Est-ce que vous parlez français? these wordswhen they speak French dictionary over! 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