The French Language Under Attack?

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French people like to complain that the French language is under siege by English, the dominant language in the world. They talk about it as if the survival of French was at stake. In reality, the number of French speakers is growing in the world but it is particularly true in places you would not expect.

French is with English the only language that is spoken on all continents. There are about 200 million French speakers in the world. 72 million of them are classified as partial speakers. It ranks 9th in all spoken languages in terms of usage. French is spoken as a first or second language in 51 countries.

The French language is well alive and always evolving. Adoption of new words in the official dictionaries is up to the French Academy (l’’Academie Française) an independent institution whose role it is to protect and control the evolution of the French language.

In France, even the government has stepped in to officially replace or encourage French people to use newly created French words to replace new English words that do not have an equivalent in French. Examples are ecourrier for e-mail, pourriel for spam.

Certain industries like advertising, broadcasting and certain commercial communications like billing statements and direction manuals have to be written in French. The French went so far as to amend their constitution in 1992 so that French is now the official language of the Republic.

Contrary to popular belief, the number of French speakers is more important on the African continent (10% of the population) than in Europe. The United States counts 700,000 French speakers far behind Canada with 9,200,000. Most of them (6,800,000) are located in Québec. In the European Union, French is in second position in terms of usage, tied with Italian (16%), behind German and ahead of English (15.9%).

On the internet, French is somewhat underrepresented with only 5% of all web pages in French. One could say it is better than none which is the case for 90% of all languages. German does a little better with 7% of all pages and English takes the crown with no less than 45% of all web pages. English is the most studied language in the world but French is in second place.

One reason the French are may be a little paranoid about the place of French in the world is that they have been used to its prominent place. French has always been important in diplomacy. French was the chosen language for most treaties between nations in history. It was the favorite language of the Spanish Kings and Russian Tsars. It is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the Olympics and the African Union.

Because 3 out of 4 of the French speakers are located in countries with high birth rates, one can expect that the use of the French language is only going to keep growing. Africa for example counts the largest number of French speakers in the world and its population is supposed to double from 1995 to 2025, going from 728 millions to 1.49 billion.