Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) largely supplanted.

However it has also become a native language in a number of urban areas, especially in the cities of Abidjan in Ivory Coast,[9][10] Kinshasa and Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo,[11][12][13][14] Douala in Cameroon,[15][16] Libreville in Gabon,[17][18] and Antananarivo in Madagascar.

French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France.

As the language was learned by the common people, it developed a distinct local character, with grammatical differences from Latin as spoken elsewhere, some of which is attested in graffiti.

The evolution of Latin in Gaul was shaped by its coexistence for over half a millennium beside the native Celtic Gaulish language, which did not go extinct until the late sixth century, long after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

berceau), farming and rural units of measure (arpent, lieue, borne, boisseau), weapons,[40] and products traded regionally rather than further afield.

[44] The period is marked by a heavy superstrate influence from the Germanic Frankish language, which non-exhaustively included the use in upper-class speech and higher registers of V2 word order,[45] a large percentage of the vocabulary (now at around 15% of modern French vocabulary[46]) including the impersonal singular pronoun on (a calque of Germanic man), and the name of the language itself.

The phonology was characterized by heavy syllabic stress, which led to the emergence of various complicated diphthongs such as -eau which would later be leveled to monophthongs.

[citation needed] The earliest evidence of what became Old French can be seen in the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, while Old French literature began to be produced in the eleventh century, with major early works often focusing on the lives of saints (such as the Vie de Saint Alexis), or wars and royal courts, notably including the Chanson de Roland, epic cycles focused on King Arthur and his court, as well as a cycle focused on William of Orange.

[citation needed] It was during the period of the Crusades in which French became so dominant in the Mediterranean Sea that became a lingua franca ("Frankish language"), and because of increased contact with the Arabs during the Crusades who referred to them as Franj, numerous Arabic loanwords entered French, such as amiral (admiral), alcool (alcohol), coton (cotton) and sirop (syrop), as well as scientific terms such as algébre (algebra), alchimie (alchemy) and zéro (zero).

It retained this role until approximately the middle of the 20th century, when it was replaced by English as the United States became the dominant global power following the Second World War.

[49][50] Stanley Meisler of the Los Angeles Times said that the fact that the Treaty of Versailles was written in English as well as French was the "first diplomatic blow" against the language.

[51] During the Grand Siècle (17th century), France, under the rule of powerful leaders such as Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV, enjoyed a period of prosperity and prominence among European nations.

Near the beginning of the 19th century, the French government began to pursue policies with the end goal of eradicating the many minorities and regional languages (patois) spoken in France.

This began in 1794 with Henri Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the use of the French language".

The goals of the public school system were made especially clear to the French-speaking teachers sent to teach students in regions such as Occitania and Brittany.

Instructions given by a French official to teachers in the department of Finistère, in western Brittany, included the following: "And remember, Gents: you were given your position in order to kill the Breton language".

[22][56] Under the Constitution of France, French has been the official language of the Republic since 1992,[57] although the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts made it mandatory for legal documents in 1539.

[65][66] This number does not include the people living in non-Francophone African countries who have learned French as a foreign language.

Due to the rise of French in Africa, the total French-speaking population worldwide is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050.

[74] Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth.

Out of about 900,000 students, about 500,000 are enrolled in Francophone schools, public or private, in which the teaching of mathematics and scientific subjects is provided in French.

[103][105] According to a demographic projection led by the Université Laval and the Réseau Démographie de l'Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, the total number of French speakers will reach approximately 500 million in 2025 and 650 million by 2050, largely due to rapid population growth in sub-Saharan Africa.

[21] In a study published in March 2014 by Forbes, the investment bank Natixis said that French could become the world's most spoken language by 2050.

[111] Given the demographic prospects of the French-speaking nations of Africa, researcher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote in 2014 that French "could be the language of the future".

[112] However, some African countries such as Algeria intermittently attempted to eradicate the use of French, and as of 2024 it was removed as an official language in Mali and Burkina Faso.

While it contains 130 graphemes that denote only 36 phonemes, many of its spelling rules are likely due to a consistency in morphemic patterns such as adding suffixes and prefixes.

The us ending, very common in Latin, was then abbreviated by copyists (monks) by the letter x, resulting in a written form animax.

Some types of sentences allow for or require different word orders, in particular inversion of the subject and verb, as in "Parlez-vous français ?"

In Switzerland, depending on the local dialect, 80 can be quatre-vingts (Geneva, Neuchâtel, Jura) or huitante (Vaud, Valais, Fribourg).