French belongs to the language family of the Indo-European languages and is placed in the Gallo-Rhaetian group of the Italic-Romance branch.
French is a global language that is spoken by around 220 million people on all the continents and that is often learnt as a foreign language. There are about 115 million people who have French as their mother tongue. French is an official language in 28 states on 4 continents. As a second language French is widely used in the former colonies in Africa and Indochina. Furthermore it is, next to English, the most important working and official language of the European Union, of the Council of Europe and of the United Nations.
Historically French is the main form of the “langue(s) d’oil” in the north of France, which differ from the “langue(s) d’oc” in the south of France, of which the main form is Occitan.
Hello - salut
Bye - Au revoir!
Thank you - merci
Please - s’il vous plaît
Cheers - santé!
You are not alone - Tu n’es pas seul/e
More than other Romance languages, French has undergone a phonetic and morphologic development away from its Vulgar Latin roots.
French in Italy (112.000 Speaker)
French-speaking Swiss in Switzerland (1.156.000 Speaker)
French in United Kingdom (14.000 Speaker)
French in Andorra (5.000 Speaker)
Walloons in Belgium (3.260.000 Speaker)
Luxembourg (13.100 Speaker)
France (50.386.000 Speaker)
Monaco (32.000 Speaker)