If France is the biggest French-speaking nation in the world-and also the country where the French language is born-it is far to be the only one. Indeed, the language has travelled a lot through history, and we face today a world-size map of the French-speaking countries.
The “Francophonie” include all the countries and regions where French is a lingua franca or customary language, and where a significant proportion of the population are francophones (which means they speak French).
Who are the French-speakers and how many are they?
To understand the distribution of French in the world, it is important to define what makes a person a Francophone, or french-speaker, and how many there are.
In total, there are 270 millions francophones in the world, and we can distinguish:
- those who speak French as their mother tongue, also called first language or native language (80 millions of people)
- those who speak French as their secondary language (190 millions of people)
Fun fact
But when talking about French speakers, we should not forget francophiles (fans of the French language and its culture), and the people who learn French for practical reasons (for work or because they live close to the French border). Thanks to those 2 groups, the population of French-speaker could be extended even more, but it is hard to have a precise number, especially because learning a langage (especially French!) is a evolutionnary process, and it is therefore hard to take a census of how many persons are actually speaking French after they learned it in a school.
Anyway, the fun fact here is that countries like Germany or Italy count more french-speaker (including those 2 groups, then) than in Belgium, Canada, or Switzerland, even if the latter have a bigger proportion of french-speakers and that the daily use of French is more common.
Where is French an official langage?
French is an official language in 29 countries. But a distinction between 2 categories should be made:
- countries where French is the UNIQUE official language. It can be the mother tongue of the entire population like in France, or a vehicular language (also called “lingua franca”) where French is used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language. This is for example the case of Congo or Côte d’Ivoire.
- countries where French is an official language among others. It can be the mother tongue of a part of the population like it is the case in Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada. It can also be the language learned by an important part of the population, like in Cameroun or in Seychelles. Thirdly, it can be a language with an official status for historical and political reason, and yet only used by a little proportion of the population, like in Vanuatu or in Comores.
What are the main French-speaking countries?
France is of course the country with the biggest population of francophones (60 million). In the second place, we have Canada, with 7 million francophones. Belgium comes third with 4 million and Switzerland forth, with 2 milion french-speakers.
From a continental perspective, Africa is the continent with the most French speakers in the world. It is estimated that approximately 115 million Africans live in French-speaking countries and speak the language, either as a first language or as a second language. Indeed, French is mainly spoken alongside indigenous languages, but in the most urban areas it has become the first language.
Here is a top-down list of the principal french-speaking countries (either as a first or second language):
- France
- Canada
- Belgium
- Switzerland
- Congo
- Côte d’Ivoire
- Madagascar
- Cameroun
- Burkina Faso
- Nigeria
- Mali
- Sénégal
- Haïti
- Bénin
What explains the spread of the French langage?
History allow us to understand why the French langage is spread across the world. Here are the main events that will help you understand the journey the French langage has gone through:
- the emergence of French as the international language during the Middle Age thanks to the influence of the Realm of France.
- French becoming the lingua franca of Europe, instead of Latin in the 17th century, and the main diplomatic language in the 18th century.
- the First French Colonial Empire from the 16th century: colonization in many regions of the world such as Québec, Antilles (Guadeloupe, Saint-Martin, Martinique…), Guyane…
- the Second French Colonial Empire from 1815: colonization of most African regions (such as Senegal, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Madagascar..) but also Asia (Indochine), and Oceania (Nouvelle-Calédonie, Polynésie Française, Vanuatu).
- the independancy of Belgium in 1830, and the proclamation of French as its sole official language.
- the proclamation of French as official language in Switzerland in 1848, alongside German and Italian. This is explained by the fact that the western part of the country was occupied by French-speakers, already back in the Antiquity.
Nowadays, France has no longer any colony nut the colonization left a trace on the map of the world with many ancient-colonies still speaking French as their first or secondary language.
If colonies belongs now to the past, a small part of the French colonies remain attached to mainland France, with the status of Outre-mer: the DROM and the COM. The DROM (Départements ou Régions français d’Outre-Mer) include Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Réunion and Mayotte. They have the same status as in the mainland: they follow the same rules, they reprensented by the same representatives in the Parliament. The COM (Collectivités d’Outre-Mer), however, benefit from more autonomy and are considered as distinct from the French state. The COM bring together Polynésie française, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Wallis-et-Futin, Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélémy. In those Outre-Mer territories, French now coexists with local langages among which créole is the most known.
To conclude
French is spoken by 270 million people across the globe and is the (or an) official language in 29 countries from all the continents. Makes you want to learn French? I hope so!
All those journeys did not come without any consequences on the langage, and that is where dialects become significants. But this will be the subject of another article!