French language is the official language of France and its overseas territories. It is also an official language of Belgium, Canada, Haiti, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland, and many African countries. More people speak such languages as Chinese, English, Russian, or Spanish than speak French. However, French is so widely spoken that it ranks with English as an international language. It is one of the working languages of such international organizations as the Council of Europe, the International Court of Justice, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Nations. French is also a working language in many nonprofit groups, including Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
French is a beautiful and harmonious language. It has served for hundreds of years as the language of diplomats. Its clear style and regular syntax (arrangement of words) make it especially suitable for diplomatic, legal, and business use, and for literature.
Many of the words in the English language come from French, though English and French belong to different branches of the Indo-European language family. French belongs to the Romance branch, and English developed from the Germanic branch.
English began to absorb French words after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The Normans came from Normandy, a region of what is now France. The king’s court and courts of justice used French. However, the common people continued to speak English. French words gradually became part of English. For example, the words mouton, boeuf, and porc, which the nobility used instead of sheep, ox, and swine, became mutton, beef, and pork in English. Thousands of French terms have been adopted, in whole or in part, into English. They include art, castle, dress, faith, prison, question, and theater.
French grammar
Nouns and adjectives.
All French nouns are either masculine or feminine. The gender of a noun, in turn, affects related pronouns, adjectives, and some participles. For example, the book (le livre) is masculine, and the chair (la chaise) is feminine. In most cases, adjectives are made feminine by adding e. Thus, the feminine of petit (small) is petite. Plurals are most commonly formed by adding s to the singular. The plural of le petit livre is les petits livres. The plural of la petite chaise is les petites chaises. Le and la are the masculine and feminine singular forms of the definite article the. Les is both the masculine plural form and the feminine plural form.
Pronouns.
Earlier forms of both English and French made a distinction between familiar (used among family and friends) and polite forms of address. The singular subject pronoun thou and the plural subject pronoun you in English correspond to tu and vous in French. Thou is no longer used in English. However, the distinction between the familiar tu form and the polite or plural vous form still exists today in French and in the other Romance languages.
Verbs.
French has 14 tenses, 7 simple and 7 compound. The simple tenses are formed by adding endings to the infinitive or to the stem of the verb. The compound tenses are made up of the past participle of the verb and an appropriate form of one of the auxiliary (helping) verbs avoir (to have) or être (to be). Included in these tenses is a special French literary past tense (le passé simple) that is used in formal writing. French also has a subjunctive case that is frequently used.
In written French, verbs are classified according to the endings of their infinitives. They fall into three groups of regular verbs: -er verbs, such as donner (to give); -ir verbs, such as finir (to finish); and -re verbs, such as vendre (to sell). French also has many irregular verbs.
Word order
in French is similar to that in English in many cases. As in English, the normal order is subject-verb-object. A sentence is made negative by placing ne before the verb and pas after it. A question is formed by inverting the order of the subject and verb or by placing est-ce que (is it that) before the sentence. The following are forms of the sentence John gives the books to my friends.
Affirmative: Jean donne les livres à mes amis. Negative: Jean ne donne pas les livres à mes amis. Interrogative: Jean donne-t-il les livres à mes amis? or Est-ce que Jean donne les livres à mes amis?
Pronunciation
of French is often difficult for English-speaking people. The French do not pronounce final consonants, except for the letters c, f, l, and r. For example, lits (beds) is pronounced lee, and et (and) is pronounced ay. French vowels are sharp, clear, single sounds. A few do not occur in English. For example, there is no exact equivalent for the u of lune (moon). It is a sound that combines ee and oo and is made with the lips rounded. Syllables that end in n or m have a nasal sound. The French r is pronounced by vibrating the uvula, a fleshy extension of the roof of the mouth that hangs above the throat. The French r sounds harsher than the English r.
In French, each syllable of a word usually has the same emphasis. However, the final syllable of a sentence or phrase is sometimes accented. For instance, the expression comment allez-vous? (how are you?) is often pronounced kuhm mawn tah lay VOO. In addition, the French often link words together. For example, les enfants (the children) is pronounced lay zawn fawn.
Written French.
French uses the same alphabet as English, but its use of diacritics, or accents, gives it a distinct appearance on the printed page. Accents in French are used to indicate different sounds or values of a letter. The most common accents in French are the acute accent used over the letter e (é) and the grave accent, also used over the letter e (è) or over other vowels such as a or u. The grave accent helps the reader quickly recognize the meaning of certain homonyms (words that sound alike) such as ou (or) as opposed to où (where).
The other French accents are the diaeresis, the cedilla, and the circumflex. The diaeresis is found in words such as Noël (Christmas). The cedilla is found in words like leçon (lesson) and français (French). The circumflex is generally used to indicate that a letter or letters have been removed from the original Latin word in making the French one, such as âme (soul in English, animus in Latin) or jeûner (to fast in English, jejunare in Latin).
Development
Beginnings.
French, like other Romance languages, developed from Latin. When the Roman emperor Julius Caesar conquered Gaul (now mainly France) in the 50’s B.C., he found the people speaking a language called Gaulish. The Gauls gradually adopted the language of the Roman soldiers. This language, called vernacular (common) Latin, differed from the Latin used by educated people.
The Gauls did not learn to speak popular Latin as the soldiers spoke it. They changed the vocabulary on the basis of the way the words sounded. For example, a Gaul hearing the stressed syllables bon and ta of the word bonitatem (kindness) shortened the word to bonta. This word has become bonté in modern French. Although French speakers shortened the Latin words they used, the French spelling has sometimes preserved traces of the original Latin spelling. For example, the English word time in Latin was tempus, and in French it is temps.
Only about 350 Gaulish words have become part of modern French. The Franks, who invaded Gaul repeatedly from A.D. 200 to 400, renamed the country France. They contributed about 1,000 words to French. Danish Vikings, who occupied northern France in the 800’s, added about 90 words. A number of French words have also come from Greek. As French has developed, its grammar has changed.
Old French.
By the 700’s, vernacular Latin had evolved so completely into la langue romane, also called Romance, that few could read Latin without a dictionary. The new language first appeared in written form in the Oaths of Strasbourg, a treaty signed by two descendants of the Frankish king Charlemagne in 842.
Beginning in the 900’s, Romance developed in France into Old French, which had two distinct dialects, each with many minor dialects. The langue d’oc flourished in the south, and the langue d’oïl prevailed in the north. These terms came from the word for yes, which was oc in the south and oïl in the north. The most famous dialect of the langue d’oc was Provençal, the language of the troubadours. A dialect of the langue d’oïl spoken in the area around Paris became the accepted tongue throughout France because of the political influence of the capital.
Modern French.
During the Renaissance, a period in European history from about 1300 to 1600, more Greek and Latin words were added to French. In the 1500’s, the French people had many contacts with the Spaniards and Italians and adopted a number of Spanish and Italian words.
During the 1600’s, writers and scholars began to standardize the structure of French. The Académie française (French Academy) was founded by the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. The members of this intellectual organization produced a definitive dictionary of the French language. Today, the Académie is composed of 40 lifetime members who meet regularly to discuss standard usage in French. They also revise definitions and prepare new entries for the next dictionary.
In 1784, the French author Antoine Rivarol could boast “Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français” (“What is not clear is not French”). Today, speakers of French consider it one of the most precise languages. The French often refer to their language as “la langue de Molière” (Molière’s language) after the great French author and actor Molière (1622-1673). Molière was the stage name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin.
See also French literature; French Academy.
