The French Language

For those of you who don't know me well, it may interest you to learn that I am bilingual (French being my second language) and that I am a hopelessly devoted francophile.

I pass a surprising amount of an average week speaking or reading French, have a pretty healthy network of friends and "colleagues" who are francophones, and I take any opportunity I can to take in French movies and plays, spend time in Montreal, or heave myself over to France (I hope to spend a couple or three days in Paris in about three weeks on my way to Reboot 9 in Copenhagen).

Anyway, tomorrow night I am going to a lecture / discussion with a francophone friend, la belle Isabelle, on a relatively new book titled The Story Of French,  a book I almost bought when I was in Montreal two weeks ago.

Some additional interesting facts about French:

FACTS ABOUT FRENCH (For those interested in facts and figures)

from The Story of French

GLOBAL STATUS

French is second only to English for the number of countries where it has official status – 33 as opposed to 45.
And the number of countries that are members of the Francophonie is equal that of the Commonwealth, at 53.

French is also the only language, with English, that is taught in every country of the world,
with 100 million students and 2 million teachers – 20 % of whom outside of francophone countries.

French is still a working language of the UN, the EU and dozens of international organizations
including the International Red Cross committee, Doctors without Borders, and the International Labour Organization.
Francophone countries form an important bloc in the UN, the EU, the African Union and the Arab League.

Two G-8 countries (France and Canada) and six European countries (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania,
Luxemburg, Monaco) are fully or partly French-speaking.

LANGUAGE

About a third to a half of basic English words come from French, including pedigree, surf, view, strive,
challenge, pride, staunch, mayday and war. (IMO, those are poor choices of examples, and there are so very many words that are clearly from the same root in both languages).

French has more than a million words and 5000 new ones are created every year.

IN CANADA

Canada is one of the few countries that uses the Common Law in French, and Quebec’s language protection
measures have been a model for policy in Spain, France, Brazil, and 33 US States.

In Canada, 300 000 children are enrolled in French immersion programs.

IN AMERICA

There are eight million francophones living in North America, and most are descendents of
only 10 000 original French colonists (my clarification - most of these people are of course in Quebec, with smatterings in Nova Scotia and Louisiana).

In the United States, French is the number four native language and
the second most taught second language after Spanish.

The main centers of French in the United States are New England, Louisiana, California and Florida (New England ... a few francophones in New Hampshire and Maine from back when boundaries were less clear, some diplomats and professionals in NYC and Boston, ex-pats from the Montreal film industry in Hollywood, and a (pretty large) bunch of what are euphemistically called "snowbirds" (escapees from the winters of Quebec) in Florida).

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