French: a short portrait

Where it comes from

French is a Romance language: it grew out of the Latin spoken in Roman Gaul, which Julius Caesar conquered in the first century BC. The Celtic language of the Gauls slowly gave way to Latin, but it left a handful of words behind, among them le chêne, the oak.

After Rome, the Franks — a Germanic people — took over the north. They gave the country its name and gave French words such as la guerrewarle jardingardenblancwhite

A short history

The oldest text in an early form of French is the Oaths of Strasbourg, sworn in 842 by two grandsons of Charlemagne. In the Middle Ages France was split between the dialects of the north, the langue d’oïl, and those of the south, the langue d’oc — each named after its word for «yes». Standard French grew out of the northern dialect around Paris.

In 1066 the Normans, who spoke a dialect of French, conquered England, and for some three hundred years French was the language of the English court, the law and the nobility. Back in France, a royal decree of 1539 made French rather than Latin the language of the law courts and official documents.

In 1635 Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie française to watch over the language. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French became the language of European courts and of diplomacy, and from the seventeenth century onwards it travelled with French settlers and later with colonial rule to North America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific.

Where it is spoken today

French is spoken in France, in Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, in western Switzerland, in Luxembourg and Monaco, in Quebec and other parts of Canada, in Haiti, and in a long list of African countries from Senegal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A large and growing share of the world’s French speakers live in Africa.

The varieties understand each other easily, but you will notice the differences. Belgians and the Swiss count septante for seventy and nonante for ninety, where France says soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix; in parts of Switzerland eighty is huitante.

Quebec French has its own sound and many words of its own: you go magasiner rather than faire du shopping, and the weekend is la fin de semaine. The word courriel for e-mail was coined in Quebec and later recommended in France too.

How French is written

French uses the Latin alphabet with five kinds of mark: the acute (é), the grave (è, à, ù), the circumflex (â, ê, î, ô, û), the diaeresis (ë, ï) and the cedilla (ç).

The circumflex is a gift for English speakers. It often marks an s that was once pronounced and has disappeared — and that English, which borrowed the word earlier, still has: la forêtforestl’hôpitalhospitall’îleislela fêtefeast

French spelling keeps the memory of older pronunciation, so many letters are written and not spoken, especially at the end of a word. Il parle and ils parlent sound exactly the same. The spelling is not random, though: it is hard to write from hearing, but quite reliable to read aloud once you know the patterns. A reform recommended in 1990 simplified some spellings, and both the old and the new forms count as correct.

Words it gave and words it took

Few languages have given English as many words as French. After 1066 the Norman rulers ate the meat while English farmers raised the animals, and English still shows it: «cow», «pig» and «sheep» are English, but «beef», «pork» and «mutton» come from French bœuf, porc and mouton.

Later borrowings kept their French look: «café», «ballet», «cuisine», «genre», «rendezvous», «déjà vu», «entrepreneur». This is why an English reader can often follow a French newspaper headline before learning a single rule.

French itself has borrowed from English, especially in sport, business and technology — le week-end, le parking. Official bodies in France and Quebec suggest French replacements, and some have caught on completely: l’ordinateurcomputerle logicielsoftware

What tends to surprise English speakers

Many forms that look different sound the same: parle, parles and parlent are one sound. At the same time, a silent final consonant can suddenly be pronounced when the next word starts with a vowel: les amis is said with a z sound in the middle. This linking is called liaison.

Every noun is masculine or feminine, and you choose between tu and vous for «you» — vous for strangers and for more than one person. The negative has two parts, ne … pas, although in relaxed speech the ne often disappears.

Counting from seventy upwards in France takes a little arithmetic: quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, ninety-nine, is «four twenties and nineteen».

And some words are false friends: la librairiebookshopactuellementcurrentlysensiblesensitivela déceptiondisappointment