A revision of the French constitution creating official recognition of regional languages was implemented by the Parliament in Congress at Versailles in July 2008.

[5] The regional languages of France are sometimes called patois, but this term (roughly meaning "dialects") is often considered derogatory.

In April 2001, the Minister of Education, Jack Lang,[8] stated formally that "Depuis plus de deux siècles, les pouvoirs politiques ont combattu les langues régionales", ie for more than two centuries, the political powers of the French government had repressed regional languages, and announced that bilingual education would, for the first time, be recognised, and bilingual teachers recruited in French public schools.

French itself is also a cross-border language, being spoken in neighbouring Andorra, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, and Switzerland.

Mother tongues of the French population (2007 AES) According to the 2007 Adult Education survey, part of a project by the European Union and carried in France by the Insee and based on a sample of 15,350 people, French was the mother tongue of 87.2% of the total population, or roughly 55.81 million people, followed by Arabic (3.6%, 2.3 million), Portuguese (1.5%, 960,000), Spanish (1.2%, 770,000) and Italian (1.0%, 640,000).

(Figures as of 2000)[2] At the 1999 census, INSEE sampled 380,000 adult people all across Metropolitan France, and asked them questions about their family situation.

[18] Entries identified by Ethnologue as macrolanguages (such as Arabic, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese, encompassing all their respective varieties) are not included in this section.