French

The Lord’s Prayer in French:

Notre Père, qui es aux cieux,
que ton nom soit sanctifié,
que ton règne vienne,
que ta volonté soit faite sur la terre comme au ciel.
Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain de ce jour.
Pardonne-nous nos offences
comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés.
Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation,
mais délivre-nous du mal.
Amen.

French (842- ) is the main language of France, where it is the mother tongue of 61 million people. It is the first language of at least a million people in Canada (7.3m), Belgium (4.2m), Switzerland (1.8m) and the US (1.3m). Another 137 million or so use it daily as a second language, most of them in Africa. French is one of the six languages of the United Nations.

Where French is spoken as a first or second language. The darker the shade of blue, the more commonly it is used.

Of the languages that came from Latin, Spanish and even Portuguese have more speakers. French, though, is more common on the Internet.

French comes from the Latin spoken in the streets of Paris. Over time Latin slowly changed into what we know as French. It was already noticeably French by the 800s. But it became the universal language of France only in the 1800s when everyone had to learn the French of Paris in school. The top people and the best writers used it. The other sorts of French and the other languages of France – Breton, Basque, Occitan and Catalan – have been slowly and sadly dying out. Occitan, not French, was the language of the troubadours in the 1100s.

From the 1000s to the 1300s the top people in England spoke French. They spoke a English full of French words. In time it became the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

I wrote this in English, yet it would have been hard to do without these words from French:

language, people, nation, region, notice, form, change, universal, use, sort, rule, power, pure, perfect, common, slave, push, prefer, glory, banker, shop, paint, dance.

Even the -s ending for plurals comes from French!

In the 1700s in Haiti another language full of French words won the day: Creole. It grew out of the broken French of the African slaves. Creole is made of French words with some from Africa, but the words are put together in a way that is not French at all. Some argue it is a dialect of French, others say it is a separate language.

In the 1700s and 1800s French became the top language of the West, pushing aside Latin. Anyone with self-respect and a good education knew it. In Tolstoy you can read how even in Russia many preferred French to their own language. Marie Curie learned it in Poland and later went to France to make her mark in the world. So did Picasso from Spain and Josephine Baker from America.

But in the late 1900s the glory days came to an end. English, a language of bankers and shopkeepers, not of painters and dancers, became the top language in the West.

– Abagond, 2007, 2015.

See also:

• external links
  • The Wikipedia in French
  • Wikipedia: Geographical distribution of French speakers
• Top languages – because of Africa, French will probably remain in the top ten till at least 2100.
• Latin
  • Haitian Creole
  • Catalan
  • Spanish
• English
  • Middle English
• France
• United Nations
• French Empire

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