French language
French (French: français) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. It developed from the spoken Latin used in Roman Gaul and became the main national language of France. It is also used as an official language in several other states.
French is written with the Latin alphabet. It uses several diacritics, including the acute accent, grave accent, circumflex, diaeresis, and cedilla. Its ISO 639-1 code is fr. Its ISO 639-2 codes are fra and fre, with fra used as the terminological code and fre as the bibliographic code.
History
[edit | edit source]French developed from Vulgar Latin after the Roman conquest of Gaul. The language was shaped by local Gallo-Romance speech and by later Frankish influence after the collapse of Roman authority in western Europe.
Old French was used in northern France during the medieval period. The dialects of northern France were known as the langues d'oïl. Over time, the speech of Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France region became the basis for standard French. The growth of royal administration, law, education, printing, and literature strengthened the use of French as a written and official language.
The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts of 1539 made French the language of royal legal and administrative records in France. This helped replace Latin in state administration and gave French a stronger official position within the French kingdom.
Geographic distribution
[edit | edit source]French is the official language of France and is used in national government, education, law, media, and public administration. It is also the official language of Monaco.
In Belgium, French is one of the three official languages, alongside Dutch and German. It is the main language of Wallonia and is widely used in Brussels.
In Switzerland, French is one of the four official languages, alongside German, Italian, and Romansh. It is mainly used in western Switzerland, including Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel, and Jura.
Outside Europe, French is used in parts of Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. In many African states, French is used in government, education, courts, administration, and cross-regional communication.
Writing system
[edit | edit source]French uses the Latin script. The modern alphabet has 26 basic letters. Written French also uses accented forms, apostrophes, hyphens, and elision marks. Spelling preserves many historical forms that are no longer fully pronounced in modern speech.
Grammar
[edit | edit source]French grammar has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. Nouns and adjectives are marked for number in writing, although many plural endings are silent in speech. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, and number. The usual basic word order is subject–verb–object.
French lost most of the noun case system inherited from Latin. Modern grammatical relations are mainly shown through word order, prepositions, articles, and pronouns.