[Note 1] This includes those who speak French as a first or second language in these 34 African countries and territories (some of which are not Francophone, but merely non-Francophone members or observers of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie or OIF), but it does not include French speakers living in other African countries.

French proficiency in African countries according to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

In the colonial period, a vernacular form of creole French known as Petit nègre ("little negro") was also present in West Africa.

According to Gabriel Manessy, "The consequences of this concurrency may vary according to the social status of the speakers, to their occupations, to their degree of acculturation and thus to the level of their French knowledge.

One of these, located in Dakar, Senegal, already spoke of the creolization[inconsistent] of French in 1968, naming the result "franlof": a mix of French and Wolof (the language most spoken in Senegal) which spreads by its use in urban areas and through schools, where teachers often speak Wolof in the classroom despite official instructions.

[19] The omnipresence of local languages in Francophone African countries – along with insufficiencies in education – has given birth to a new linguistic concept: le petit français.

[18] Le petit français is the result of a superposition of the structure of a local language with a narrowed lexical knowledge of French.

It is used in the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa, but especially in cities such as Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire; Cotonou, Benin; Dakar, Senegal; Lomé, Togo; and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

At its emergence, it was marginalized and associated with the ghetto; Angèle Bassolé-Ouedraogo describes the reaction of the scholars: Administration and professors do not want to hear that funny-sounding and barbarian language that seems to despise articles and distorts the sense of words.

There are nonetheless some trends among African French speakers; for instance, ⟨r⟩ tends to be pronounced as the historic alveolar trill of pre-20th Century French instead of the now standard uvular trill or 'guttural R.' The voiced velar fricative, the sound represented by ⟨غ⟩ in the Arabic word مغرب Maghrib, is another common alternative.

[citation needed] According to some estimates, French is spoken by 75 to 99 percent of Abidjan's population,[23] either alone or alongside indigenous African languages.

Most of the population, however, speaks a colloquial form of French known as français de Treichville (after a working-class district of Abidjan) or français de Moussa (after a character in chronicles published by the magazine Ivoire Dimanche which are written in this colloquial Abidjan French).

Finally, an Abidjan French slang called Nouchi has evolved from an ethnically neutral lingua franca among uneducated youth into a creole language with a distinct grammar.

is constructed depending on the register:[25] Another unique, identifiable feature of Ivorian French is the use of the phrase n'avoir qu'à + infinitif which, translated into English, roughly means, to have only to + infinitive.

Some of the major phonetic and phonological variations of Abidjan French, as compared to a more "typical" French, include substituting the nasal low vowel [ɑ̃] for a non-nasal [a], especially when the sound occurs at the beginning of a word, and some difficulty with the full production of the phonemes [ʒ] and [ʃ].

In a 2007 study set in the city of Mostaganem, it was shown that French and Arabic were the two functional languages of banking.

People of different African mother tongues living in Kinshasa usually speak Lingala to communicate with each other in the street, but French is the language of businesses, administrations, schools, newspapers and televisions.