FRENCH LANGUAGE

FRENCH LANGUAGE: 

The French language (French: français, pronounced "Fronce-eh") is a Romance language that was first spoken in France.

It has also been one of the roots of other languages such as the Haitian Creole language.

It is an official or a main second language in 55 countries worldwide, and is reputed to be the foreign language which is most widely used in international communications, after English. Almost 300 million people speak French as their native language or as a second language. 

French is an official language in 29 countries across multiple different continents. French is also the 18th most natively spoken language in the world, 6th most spoken language by total number of speakers and the second most studied language worldwide (with about 120 million current learners).

French speakers will reach approximately 500 million in 2025 and 650 million by 2050.OIF estimates 700 million by 2050, 80% of whom will be in Africa.

French is written with the 26 letters of the basic Latin script, with four diacritics appearing on vowels (circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis) and the cedilla appearing in "ç".

There are two ligatures, "œ" and "æ", but they are now often not used because of the layout of the most common keyboards used in French-speaking countries. Yet, they cannot be changed to "oe" and "ae" in formal and literary texts.

French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages.

French is a moderately inflected language. Nouns and most pronouns are inflected for number (singular or plural, though in most nouns the plural is pronounced the same as the singular even if spelled differently); adjectives, for number and gender (masculine or feminine) of their nouns; personal pronouns and a few other pronouns, for person, number, gender, and case; and verbs, for tense, aspect, mood, and the person and number of their subjects. Case is primarily marked using word order and prepositions, while certain verb features are marked using auxiliary verbs.

Articles used in french language:

The indefinite articles or “a/an” in English:

un (masculine)

une (feminine)

des (plural)

The definite articles or “the” in English:

le (masculine)

la (feminine)

les (plural)

The partitive articles or “some” in English:

du (masculine)

de la (feminine)

des (plural)

Punctuation used in french language: 

In France, the exclamation mark, question mark, semicolon, colon, percentage mark, currency symbols, hash, and guillemet all require a non-breaking space before and after the punctuation mark. Outside of France, this rule is often ignored. Computer software may aid or hinder the application of this rule, depending on the degree of localisation, as it is marked differently from most other Western punctuation.

                                                     

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