Francization
[1][2][3][4] As a linguistic concept, known usually as gallicization, it is the practice of modifying foreign words, names, and phrases to make them easier to spell, pronounce, or understand in French.
According to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), the figure of 220 million Francophones (French-language speakers) is underestimated[5] because it only counts people who can write, understand and speak French fluently, thus excluding a majority of African French-speaking people, who do not know how to write.
[16] The Francophone zone of Africa is two times the size of the United States of America (including Alaska).
French culture, in aspects of architecture, culinary and linguistics, has been integrated into the local ones, although the latter remained highly distinct.
[24][full citation needed] Cookery gives a good example of this tendency: the names of many farm animals have Anglo-Saxon roots.
The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts under King Francis I of France prescribed the official use of the French language, the langue d'oïl dialect spoken at the time in the Île-de-France, in all documents.
This occurred, for example, among the Alemannic-speaking inhabitants of Alsace and the Lorraine Franconian-speaking inhabitants of Lorraine after these regions were conquered by Louis XIV during the seventeenth century, to the Flemings in French Flanders, to the Occitans in Occitania, and to Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Corsicans and Niçards.
[27] Shortly after the fall of the Ancien Régime, the new revolutionary government adopted a policy of promotion of French as a unifying and modernizing language, simultaneously denigrating the status of minority languages as bulwarks of feudalism, Church control of the state, and backwardness in general.
[29] After the Treaty of Turin was signed in 1860 between the Victor Emmanuel II and Napoleon III as a consequence of the Plombières Agreement, the County of Nice was ceded to France as a territorial reward for French assistance in the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, which saw Lombardy united with Piedmont-Sardinia.
[30][31] The French government implemented a policy of Francization of society, language and culture of the County of Nice.
This view was upheld in 2021, when Deputy Paul Molac unexpectedly won a majority vote in the French National Assembly to allow for immersive education in minority languages in state-run schools.
The Assembly's decision was immediately contested by the French Constitutional Council, which struck out the parliament's vote.
The language shift began in the eighteenth century and accelerated as Belgium became independent and Brussels expanded beyond its original city boundaries.
Halfway through the twentieth century, the number of monolingual French-speakers carried the day over the (mostly) bilingual Flemish inhabitants.
[41] Only since the 1960s, after the fixation of the Belgian language border and the socio-economic development of Flanders was in full effect, could Dutch stem the tide of increasing French use.
The Government of Quebec has francization policies intended to establish French as the primary language of business and commerce.
The Quebec Office of the French language has, since its formation, undertaken to discourage anglicisms and to promote high standards of French-language education in schools.
In 2012, that number had reached 87.5% [51] Montreal is a particular interesting case because, unlike the rest of Quebec, the French-speaking proportion of the population diminished.
[57] None of the Quebec statistics are adjusted to compensate for the percentage—approximately 20%—of Anglophones who departed the province by the mid-1980s as a consequence of linguistic nationalism.
[59] The Charter of the French Language has been a complete success, according to Hervé Lavenir de Buffon (general secretary of the "Comité international pour le français, langue européenne"), who said in 2006: "Before Bill 101, Montreal looked like an American city.
