French: Not Dead Yet
For centuries, French was Europe’s primary lingua franca and prestige language. French rose in prominence during the thirteenth century, and became Europe’s first real “international language” after Latin. French did not lose this status until the mid-twentieth century, when English took its place as the default language of international communications.
With a worldwide population of around 130 million speakers, French is still a major world language. There are native speakers of French in France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Canada, fifteen African countries, and a handful of island nations throughout the world. French is still a primary second language in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, and Tunisia. After English, French is the language most likely to appear on international documents like visas and passports.
French is a derivative of Latin, and is categorized as a Romance language. France, or ancient Gaul, became a Roman province after Caesar’s conquest of the region from 58 to 51 B.C.E. There were originally multiple dialects of French, but the Parisian dialect gradually became dominant after Paris became the capital of France in the 12th century.
French is the most difficult of the Romance languages, and requires more work than Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or even Romanian. French pronunciation takes a quite a bit of work to master, and many words do not sound like an English-speaker would expect them to, based on their pronunciation. If you have already studied another Romance language, then you will like find French grammar to be a somewhat trickier application of familiar grammatical principles.
Much has been written recently of the “decline” of French. Newsweek recently published an article about the growth of Mandarin, entitled “The Future Doesn't Speak French.” While I applaud the new interest in Chinese, I can’t agree with the implied dismissal of French.
There is no denying that French is not the global language that it was in 1900 or 1800. Moreover, French held on to its status as a prestige language in the English-speaking world long after the linguistic balance of power had titled in other directions. Nonetheless, French is still the language of one of Europe’s major economies, part of Canada, and much of the developing world. It is well worth learning-- even if you also want to learn Chinese.
