| FRENCH LANGUAGE
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SOME FACTS
French language, member of the Romance
group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European
family of languages. It is spoken as a first
language by more than 70 million people,
chiefly in France (55 million speakers),
Belgium (3 million), Switzerland (1.5 million),
former French and Belgian colonies in Africa
(5 million), and Canada (6.5 million). French
probably ranks next after English as a second
tongue. Having served as an international
language in diplomacy and commerce as well
as among educated people during the last
few centuries, it still enjoys great prestige
culturally and is one of the languages used
officially by the United Nations.
History of French
French is descended from Vulgar Latin,
the vernacular Latin (as distinguished from
literary Latin) of the Roman Empire. When
ancient Gaul (now modern France) was conquered
by the Romans in the 2d and 1st cent. B.C.,
its inhabitants spoke Gaulish, a Celtic
language, which was rapidly supplanted by
the Latin of the Roman overlords. In the
5th cent. A.D. the Franks, a group of Germanic
tribes, began their invasion of Gaul, but
they too were Romanized. Although modern
French thus inherited several hundred words
of Celtic origin and several hundred more
from Germanic, it owes its structure and
the greater part of its vocabulary to Latin.
By the 9th cent. the language spoken in
what is now France was sufficiently different
from Latin to be a distinct language. It
is called Old French and was current from
the 9th to the 13th cent. The earliest extant
text in Old French is the Oaths of Strasbourg,
dated 842. Of the various dialects of Old
French, Francien (the north-central dialect
spoken in Paris and the region around it)
in time became the standard form of the
language because of the increasing political
and cultural importance of Paris. French
from the 14th through the 16th cent. is
known as Middle French. During this period
many words and expressions were borrowed
from Latin, Greek, and Italian, and a group
of French poets, the Pleiade (see under
Pleiad), encouraged the French to develop
and improve their language and literature.
The modern period of French began in the
17th cent. In 1635 the French Academy was
founded by Cardinal Richelieu to maintain
the purity of the language and its literature
and to serve as the ultimate judge of approved
usage. While the vocabulary and style of
Modern French have been influenced by movements
such as romanticism and realism, structurally
French has changed comparatively little
since the Middle French period. Standardization
of the French language has been aided in
modern times by more widespread education
and by the mass media.
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