The French Language. A Dialect spoken in Ile de France, the French took nine centuries to impose on all of France. Today, it is spoken on five continents and became an official language in most international organizations.
There are between 3,000 and 4,000 languages and dialects spoken in the world, which are divided into a dozen families, and French is part of the Indo- European family. The same origin as the Germanic and Slavic languages or Persian and Hindi.
A language is a dialect that has conquered cultural and political field and has become the official language of one or several countries.
In the beginning was the francien, one of the dialects of northern Roman Gaul. Paris language, the language of the first king of France. In 987, the francien will emerge at the pace of territorial conquests and trade, and give birth to the French.
Key dates:
The French language took several centuries to form. Celtic languages, Gallic, Roman and Germanic dialects eventually divided into two groups:
the langue d’oc (pays d’oc – Occitanie) south of the Loire ( Limousin , Auvergne , Provence );
the langue d’oil (pays d’oil) north of the Loire ( Walloon, Picard , Champagne , Burgundy …)
With other dialects of the langue d’oil and langue d’oc, as well as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian; French has its origin in Latin. After the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar (51 BC. AD), Latin gradually replaces the Gallic language. On the occasion of the Germanic invasions, a new language takes place, The Old French. But Latin remained the language of the legal acts of the University and the Church.
This is in the 16th century that French becomes official. In 1539, François 1er promulgate the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets which substitutes French to Latin in all judgments and deeds. Meanwhile, the language is codified under the leadership of Malherbe and Vaugelas (17th century) and the French Academy gives it an official spelling (1694).
Already spoken in England in the Middle Ages, French is gradually gaining ground as the language of diplomacy and European aristocracy. The colonial ambitions of France will circulate it, from Canada to Laos.
In France, it was not until the introduction of compulsory primary education in 1880, to see the French supplant thirty local dialects still spoken in the country.
Every language has, over its history, borrowed words to his neighbor. This is one of mutual enrichment even if some see today in the supremacy of English, a threat to the French language.
Linguists agree on this point. French is a Métis language. Of some 20,000 common words, only 40 are Gallic, 10% German, 60 to 70% Latin and Greek, the rest comes from various languages, including English.
This is in the 16th century that the French lexicon as we know it today took shape in contact with European cultures. During the Renaissance, when our ancestors marked a great passion for everything that comes from Italy and its refined civilization, the French language acquired an incredible amount of Italian vocabulary in the field of the table (vermicelle), architecture, visual arts (esquisse ) and music (maestro). In the 18th century, admiration for the English political system will cause French to adopt English words. English gives us words in the realm of politics (meeting), Sport (corner), Science and Technology (engineering). The movement further amplifies in the 19th and 20th centuries by the expansion of technical and scientific progress whose origin is in England. Meanwhile, scientists need new words to describe the phenomena discovered. When they do not borrow, they create from scratch, using the Latin (acupuncture) and Greek (thermique).
Meanwhile, we had borrowed heavily to German (bivouac) and Dutch (amarrer) in the field of war and navy , regional dialects (Provencal : auberge) or in Arabic (hasard). The Spanish gave many words, among other products from America (tabac – tobacco).
Borrowings are rather in the field of words (verbs, nouns, adjectives) than sentences. Often the foreign word retains its written but pronounce the French with the accent on the last syllable (macaroni, villa) form. Sometimes it totally changes spelling (paquebot, de packetboat; bifteck, de beef-steak) . Some words of foreign origin are sufficiently well integrated in French to give derivatives (sprint, sprinting, sprinter, crawl, crawleuse). It also borrows from literal translation (grate-ciel, skyscraper). Sometimes even a French word acquires a new meaning under the influence of its foreign equivalent.
The French in the world:
If French is, alongside English, the only language spoken on all five continents, it occupies the eleventh position of the most spoken in the world after the Chinese languages, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay and Japanese. We do not speak quite the same French in Quebec, in Côte d’ Ivoire, in Algeria, or Switzerland and France … The lexicon and intonation are often different, but people come to understand.
Example of Words taken from other languages:
German (choucroute – sauerkraut, bière – beer); anglais (cabine – cabin, providence, rhum – rum, tatouage – tattoo, confortable – comfortable); arabe (alcool – alcohol); espagnol (cigare – cigar, tomate – tomato, sieste – nap); italien (cavalier – rider, costume); persian (bazar – bazaar)
; slavic(cravat – tie); turc (chagrin – grief)
