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French Language Profile FRANÇAIS |
Largely derived from Latin, French is a member of the Romance family
of Languages. Modern French is based on the romance vernacular, Francien,
once spoken in and around Paris; it is because of the cultural and political
prominence of this city that Francien, or French, emerged as
the standard language of France. The Treaty of Paris (1259) was the
first document to be written in it. French gained currency abroad largely
thanks to the literary productivity of its non-French adepts, many of
whom considered it intrinsically superior to other available forms of
speech. Brunetto Latini, an Italian, rejected his Tuscan dialect and
wrote his Trésor - a kind of Encyclopedia - in French;
Marco Polo, a Venetian, dictated his travel memoirs in French; and in
the twelfth century, after the Norman Conquest, French was adopted as
the language of the English court and remained so up to the time of
Chaucer. French thus acquired early on a reputation among educated circles
throughout Europe as a language inherently suited to elegant discourse
and belles lettres. 
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rich and varied
production of French authors, from Molliere and Rabelais to Pascal,
Flaubert and Baudelaire, contributed to the prestige of the language
abroad and continues to stand as an enduring cultural legacy of France.
France's historical role as a colonizer in Canada, Africa, and Indochina
also greatly contributed to the spread of French. While French has lost
some of the prestige it once enjoyed as the lingua franca of
Europe and as the international language of diplomacy, it remains one
of the most widely spoken languages in the world and is one of the working
languages of the United Nations. In France alone, there are more than
50 million French speakers; nearly one quarter of Canada's inhabitants
speak French, and French has been adopted as an official language in
Belgium, Switzerland, Haiti, and Madagascar as well as in Indochina
and parts of North Africa. |