Please use this email subject line: French Overtaking English Worldwide

What Most People Don’t Know: Unique French Dialects

The Swiss dialect of French has a laconic, unhurried drawl, and Canadian French combines 18th Century
French with American English borrowings. The West African literati speak with a Parisian accent, and
Moroccans use a mixture of French and Arabic in government.
You would need a very talented interpreter to handle all these dialects!

Graphic by Jonatan Argento - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16681464

According to Ethnologue.com, the respected world language website, 202.6 million people now speak French,
77.2 million of them as native speakers. French is in the top four of second languages spoken in the world,
behind English, Hindi and Arabic.
Second to Spanish in the total number of speakers world-wide, French has 3 times as many second language
speakers as Spanish, setting it up as the global business language of the future.

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French is Growing Faster Than Any Other Language

French is slated by many to be the largest world language by 2050, thanks to explosive population growth in
sub-Saharan nations like Benin, Burkina-Faso, Cape Verde, Madagascar, Mali, and Senegal.

Chinese and English now contend for the most populous language in the world, but both suffer from
depressed birth rates. These sub-Saharan nations now exhibit growth of 4%, versus .5% in China, Europe and
North America. Currently the greatest population growth hot-spot in the world is in the center of French
speaking sub-Saharan Africa.i

Graphic by Ms Sarah Welch - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59160528

A Good Second Language Option

All this makes French a good choice for business majors and others who want to study a foreign language in
order to gain an edge in the job market of the future.
French Has Clout
Taught in universities around the world, French is widely used in journalism, the courts, and academia. In
diplomacy, French is an official language of the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, the International
Olympic Committee, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
the Organization of American States, the European Space Agency, the World Trade Organization and the North
American Free Trade Agreement.

It is a working language of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, and Médecins du
Monde.

Significant as a judicial language, French is an official language of the African Court on Human and Peoples'
Rights, the Caribbean Court of Justice, the Court of Justice for the Economic Community of West African
States, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Tribunal
for the Law of the Sea, the International Criminal Court, the World Trade Organization Appellate Body, the
sole working language of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and a working language of the European
Court of Human Rights.

Based on factors like the number of native French speakers, the number of second language French speakers,
French Speaking countries along with their populations and economic power, and the prestige associated with
French fluency, renowned linguist George Werber ranked the language as the second most influential in the
world, after English.ii

A study published in March 2014 by Forbes stated that, according to the investment bank Natixis, French could
become the world's most spoken language by 2050.iii

History of French
French originally developed from the Vulgar Latin introduced with the Roman conquest of Northern Gaul in
the 1st century B.C. Northern Gaul is equivalent to the greater French speaking area of Northern Europe,
including most of France, French Switzerland and Belgium.

According to Wikipediaiv, the previously existing Gaulish language likely survived in parallel with Vulgar Latin in
France until the 6th century. Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin as it developed into French.
Some borrowings from Gaulish include oui, the word for "yes;" brave: “brave,” changer “to change,” cloche:
“bell,” crème: “cream,” flannelle: “flannel,” gallon: “gallon”, mine: “mine,” petit: “small,” pièce: “piece,” quai:
“wharf,” vassal: “vassal,” and valet: “attendant.”

Recent computational studies suggest that early gender shifts may have been motivated by the gender of
corresponding words in Gaulish.

Old French, Middle French, and Modern French

The earliest French, Old French, was greatly influenced by Germanic invasions into the country. Old French is
marked by a heavy overlay of the Germanic Frankish language.
Among many Old French dialects, the Francien dialect is the one that thrived during the Middle French period,
14th century–17th century.

Until the introduction of printing in 1470 spelling and punctuation were extremely variable. The printing press
highlighted the need for reform in spelling and the standardization of French.

The period saw the publication of the first French grammars and of the French-Latin dictionary of Robert
Estienne (1539). Latin noun declensions were lost and the first standardized rules for French appeared.

In the beginning of the 17th century the unification of French continued, as a campaign was made against
minority French languages, and the rules for Modern French were codified.

In the 17th century, French replaced Latin as the most important language of diplomacy and international
relations, and became an intercontinental language with the colonial era in Africa and Southeast Asia.

i https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59160528
ii

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317239865_ARE_THE_SIX_FACTORS_DESCRIBED_BY_WEBER_SUFFICIENT_AND_RELEVANT_TO_IDENTIFY_THE_WORLD'S_
INFLUENTIAL_LANGUAGES
iii https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/want-to-know-the-language-of-the-future-the-data-suggests-it-could-be-french/#3be6ec416d58
iv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French