French language

The birth of the French language originates from the boom in the Middle Ages in the area of Gaul where Latin was spoken. Three sets of dialects appear to be potential bases for the French language:

The 'langue d'oc' in the South (close to Latin)
The 'langue d'oïl' in the North (strongly influenced by the Germanic languages)
The 'franco-provençal' (occitan type and close to the langues d'oïl)

Only the 'langue d'oïl' obtained a national status which allowed it to be used at all levels on almost the whole territory and to monopolize the label 'French'. The precocious predominance of French in Paris, the language of the king from the 10th century, led to the rapid decline of all other forms of speech. It's in the 'oïl' region that dialects were obliterated the most. Franco-Provençal, abandoned by Lyon and Geneva in the 14th century, survived in French-speaking Switzerland for longer than it did elsewhere. In the 13th century, the crusade of the inhabitants of Albi led to the direct incorporation of the 'oc' region into the kingdom and the king's French imposed itself once again. It wasn't until the 19th century that the literary renewal of Provençal took place with the poet Frédéric Mistral and his 'Félibrige'. Nowadays, Franco-Provençal is still very much alive in the mountains of the valdotanian abbot-poet Jean Baptiste Cerlogne.

Despite the increasing hold of the language diffused all over the Ile-de-France, each of the regions resisted, not only the different dialects stemming from Latin, such as Walloon and Norman-French amongst others, but also the non-romance languages of Basque, Celtic (Breton) and Germanic origin (Flemish, Alsatian, Franciscan in Lorraine) still in use until the beginning of the 20th century.

The modern French language is a result of a happy synthesis between the language of Paris and the languages which developed in the other regions. Today, we can find the colours of these ancient dialects in the "regional French" accent (Belgian French, Haut-Marnais, Alsatian, Vaudois, Marseillais, Toulousain, Corse, etc.); which are also an alchemy between French and its Germanic origins, the refinements of Italian (in the 16th century with Catherine and Marie Médicis), exotic loans from Spanish and Portuguese (in the 17th century) and more contemporary loans from English.

The intertwining of these different origins combined with large territorial expansion led without doubt to better incorporation of the diversity, richness and poetry of the French spoken in Switzerland, in Valle d'Aosta, in Belgium, in Canada, in the Indian Ocean, in Africa and in Oceania.

> Spoken by 110 million people throughout the world, French is official in:

Europe:
Belgium, France, Valle d'Aosta* (Italy), the Channel Islands*, Luxembourg*, Monaco, Switzerland: Bern*, Fribourg*, Geneva, Jura, Neuchâtel, Valais*, Vaud.
Africa:
Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi*, Cameroon, Central Africa, Congo, Ivory Coast, Djibouti*, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania*, Nigeria, Rwanda*, Senegal, Chad*, Togo.
America:
New Brunswick*(CND), Nunavut*(CND), Québec(CND), Northwest Territories*(CND), Louisiana*(E.U.), Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon.
Indian Ocean:
La Réunion, Comores*, Madagascar*, Maurice*, Seychelles*, Mayotte.
Oceania:
Vanuatu*, Tahiti, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna

* countries with other official languages apart from French

> Classification by family:
Indo-European>Latin>Roman Occidental>Gallo-Roman>Langues d’oïl>French