Talk:French language/Archive 1

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Number of speakers too high

Isn't the number of french speaking people as a first language too high? French is native to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada (all other coutries where it is native, like Louisiana, have very few speakers of French), where the highest estimation of number of speakers are 65, 4, 2 and 10 respectively. So the highest count give a number of 81 million and not 109 million! And 81 million is actually a very exaggerated number.

Davidmr 23:08, 11 June 2006 (UTC) Indeed 109 is far too high. The proper numbers, per the ethnologue are 51, 4, 1.2, 6.7. There are also a few native french speakers elsewhere for a total of 65 million. While the ethnologue may be suspect elsewhere, these figures seem quite good.

Graeme - 12 June 2006 The numbers by Ethnologue are too small, and come from 1970's ? In fact, Africa has a very big french language speaking people. There are actually about 125 million native french speaking people in the world, not only in France, Switzerland, Belgium or Canada. and as a second language, 165 million other that can speak and understand french. Total : 290 million in 2005. (comment by 207.96.203.200 on June 12, 2006)

The main entry says: about 120 million people as a mother tongue or fluently There are about 270 million people in the world (outside France, Bel, Switz, Can) living in countries where French is an official language. There are 70 million "white country" natiuve speakers. The entry sugests there must be 50 million fluent or native speakers in the developing world. Do 20 percent of francophone Africans speak fluent French? (unsigned comment by 81.132.187.69 on August 16, 2006)

Louisiana

In Louisiana, there are french speaking people, but for the most part, they speak a dialect (Cajun French). Louisana is also not a country, and there are few non-imagrant native speakers, and there are few native immagrants.

Davidmr 23:08, 11 June 2006 (UTC) Cajun is sufficiently different to be considered a separate language, like Haitian Creole in that regard. I speak fluent French. I do not understand Cajun.

Register

This article made reference to register in French, when in fact there are no clearly defined registers for French; I've removed it because I couldn't find any other references to registers existing in French and there were no references or citations in the section.

Talking about register in an article on French gives the false impression that there are distinct written and spoken forms for the language, and that simply is not the case. French makes no greater use of register than English, and what this section of the article called register is actually simply style: spoken French (like the spoken form of just about any language) tends to be less formal and rigorous than written French, but there is no actual change of register. Dedicating paragraphs to a non-existent question of register in French seriously misleads readers of the article.

Agateller 22:39, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure that what you are saying is correct. Reading the article on registers in linguistics in Wikipedia (here) I am pretty certain this exists in French, my native language and probably in quantity of other languages for that matter. The paragraph wasn't really useful in that what it was describing was very general and applicable to other languages, however it was dealing with something that actually exists unlike what you are saying. -- Mathieugp 03:46, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

My French-as-a-foreign-language teachers in France were very careful to insist on the difference between written and spoken French, emphasizing that there is more of a difference than in other languages (with a special nod to us anglophones). But I don't know if it's a question of register, since written French can employ several registers. And we wouldn't refer to them as registers if they were really sub-registers. It might be worth noting the rigid difference between spoken and written French. IMHO this is traced back to France's efforts to preserve the language. They aren't as fluid or "loose" with it as English speakers are (This doesn't mean that French is any less rich--just that its speakers/writers are encouraged to use it differently). Ckamaeleon 01:41, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd say this is true. Written French imposes not only a very rigid (and complicated) grammar, it also imposes a much regulated form. Of course, the same is true for most other languages I know of, but in Francophone culture, the codification of the usage of the language is close to being insane. I am saying this as native French speaker and as a person who really loves the language. There is no going back once you have a respectable commande of the language for it is very rewarding to be able to easily communicate with great clarity, but boy is it a pain to go through the learning process. English speakers will be corrected on their English grammar mistakes for many years in school, but at some point in your early adulthood, it kinda stops. You can even write "kinda" if you want to because it is accepted, except maybe in Academic papers and other "serious" literature. However in French, you are pretty much commiting a sin if you write informal talk outside your private e-mail. :-) -- Mathieugp 03:38, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Davidmr 22:54, 11 June 2006 (UTC) As a fluent speaker of (Canadian) French and English, I'd have to agree. There is a major difference between spoken and written French. The difference in English is minimal. In French, no one speaks the way they write. For example, there are tenses which are written but simply are never spoken. Mind you the difference would be less if you compare the First Arrondissement with East-end London.

Old discussion

I've removed the reference to various Canadian provinces. The list is of places where the French language is official. The Canadian law governing this matter is federal, and it gives official status to French throughout the country. Eclecticology

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The Grammar page brings you here via a redirected French grammar, but there's no grammar on this page. Does anyone object to the idea of breaking the redirection, and making French Grammar a stub instead? Dduck 16:58, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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There is a column 'population density' in the list of countries where French is spoken. What purpose does that serve? To my mind it has no relevance. Popup 12:56, 2004 Feb 16 (UTC)

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I don't know how to write it in English, so someone else will have to do it: Under writing system, the trémas accent is missing. Example: Noël (Christmas), Hawaï (Hawaii) etc. Mathieugp 14:59, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I put tréma because the English words were all singular. Is trémas also singular? I'm not a native speaker. Also, do you know of examples of ü or ö in French? Quincy 03:04, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Trémas takes always an "s". I do not know of French words with ü or ö. There might be some rare ones however. The common ones are ë and ï. Mathieugp 16:43, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It seems it doesn't always take an "s" after all. My mistake. Mathieugp 13:36, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There's a name Haüy. René Just Haüy studied crystallography and his brother Valentin taught blind people. -phma 04:49, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I don't want to contradict a native French speaker, but every dictionary that I've checked lists tréma without an s in the singular. What's more, Google has 9,000 hits for "tréma," and only 829 for "trémas." For an example of ü, I've found that the recent spelling reforms put a tréma over the u in "ambigüe," although the older spelling was "ambiguë." -Lesgles 06:07 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it is spelled without and "s". It seems some people (such as me) think of the tréma as one of the two dots on the vowel. Therefore I used to think of it as les trémas, but it seems it is the symbol with the two dots that is le tréma. I never thought I'd need to learn a second language to come to realize this! :-) Mathieugp 13:42, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

No worries. I've had similar realizations with English; for example, I always used to think that "parentheses" was a singular noun. :) -Lesgles 03:42 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

And yes, ambiguë has always been an ambiguous word... ;-) Mathieugp 13:42, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

For ü : capharnaüm or aigüe. I do not think French uses ö, although I could be wrong. Trémas is always plural because there's 2 dots, although tréma can also be excusable. Take this from a native speaker ;p

Hi, and welcome to Wikipedia. It's always good to have more native French speakers. Although there are two dots, "tréma" is technically singular, because it is taken as a single diacritic (see the discussion above). Here is what the Académie said in their 1932 dictionary: TRÉMA. n. m. Signe formé de deux points qui se place au-dessus d'un e, d'un i, d'un u, pour indiquer qu'il forme une voyelle séparée de la précédente ou de la suivante. Naïf, ciguë, Saül, ïambe s'écrivent avec des trémas. Il faut mettre un tréma sur l'e d'aiguë. Par apposition, Un ï tréma. Lesgles 20:01, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

La langue française

Why is french referred to as "la langue française" but not "le français"? After all, "la langue française" literally means "the french language" and "le français" means "(the) french". (I don't know that much about french, just wanted to ask.) --Cylauj 17:43, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It could be "le français". That is how they have it on the French side of the wiki. -- Mathieugp 17:54, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It's indeed either le français (i.e. "French") or la langue française ("the French language"). The second would perhaps be used in contexts where ambiguity is undesirable (because le français can mean "some general person of French citizenship"), or where some added pomp is desired (such as the names of official commissions). David.Monniaux 16:11, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Spelling reform

Question: There was a reform of the written standard in the mid 90's which now begins to be adopted (modification of the byzantine rules for composite names, of those for the circumflex and the umlaut, borrowed words to follow french grammatical rules, and a hundred or so anomalies (ph'es not from hellenic words and a few peculiarities of writing like imbécile with imbécillité). As it is only recently beginning to see adoption (very few publications, still a lot of opposition by people who feel a passionate love of the spelling nenuphar (which was missed when words like sopha or phantasme were modified to use an f instead), or for various reasons), it is used according to the will of the writer; should it be mentionned somewhere in the article under the writing system heading? David

There is an article entitled Spelling reform which deals with spelling reforms for various languages, including English, French, Russian etc. -- Mathieugp 18:03, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Impact of regional languages

Some linguists estimate that 10% of the French today understand a local dialect (although they may not speak it). I removed it, since the claim sounds quite far-fetched to me and no reference was given – it could just be a statistic made on the spot. David.Monniaux 16:40, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)

--->This claim can be found in Kidd and Reynolds, Contemporary French Cultural Studies, NY: Oxford U Press, 2000, p. 98. : "Within metropolitain France, the best available estimates suggest that regional dialects or languages are known by around 10 per cent of the total population, or about 30 per cent if the highest (but doubtful) estimates of the Occitan-speakers are accepted (Ager 1990, 29)." The Ager reference is for D. Ager, Sociolinguistics and Contemporary French, Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1990. I have reinstated the line.

Sorting / Collation

Many languages which make use of diacritics and ligatures have special ways of incorporating them when alphabetizing lists. Commonly, words differing only by the use of diacritics or otherwise equivalent ligatures have a "2nd level" of sorting whereby words without these special forms of letters come before those with special forms.

Probably true also for diacritics in French, indeed. But maybe not for ligatures "oe" which don't play a role (you don't have pairs of words that only differ with respect to such ligatures). --FvdP

I have heard that in the case of French it's even more complex because proper French alphabetization requires that accents at the end of the word must be compared before accents at the beginning of the word. Is this true? I think a section on collation whatever the answer, would be a useful addition. — Hippietrail 09:43, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've never heard of such a thing and don't know what the rationale would be for it (and I'm a native -- but not a language technician.) --FvdP

Orthography/sounds

How about Sounds of French and/or Orthography of French articles? These would probably be quite appropriate. Spanish and Portuguese havce "sounds of" article. These could be used to point out allophonic variation (such as the various admissible rs) and recent sound disappearances.--Circeus 17:35, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

All done! I've moved the phonology section to a new article. I've made a lots of notes on allophones and phonemes. A good review from European speakers would be appreciated.--Circeus 19:05, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Help!

We'd like to add the correct pronunciation of the name of composer Pierre Boulez in IPA to the article about him, but we're having some diffculty deciding whether the final consonant is a Voiceless alveolar fricative or a Voiced alveolar fricative... I hope that perhaps one of the people who keep an eye on the French language page can help us out. (See Talk:Pierre Boulez; thanks!) David Sneek 12:48, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Nos ancêtres les Gaulois

Removed the bold part in: Although in the past many Frenchmen liked to refer to their descent from Gallic ancestors (nos ancêtres les Gaulois) to make fun of their own origines

because it was probably more serious than that. AFAIK, traditional history manuals (first half of XXth century) tended to begin with the Gallic roots of France (and of Belgium, regarding belgian manuals). That was not for fun, but in order to give a sense of historic depth to the French nation (respectively "Belgian Nation"). --FvdP 19:08, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Just to say I agree. ? SeeSchloß 00:04, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I add that it was in fact very serious, and that it was deeply tied with the French nationalism of the late XIXth and early XXth century, as was e.g. the glorification of Vercingetorix. Nowadays, however, the phrase epitomizes this nationalism and is cited to ridicule this ideology and its associated obsolete theories. I suppose that's where the confusion came from. _R_ 15:11, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Right. This phrase is often cited nowadays as a kind of laughable nationalistic one, especially as a reference to when it was used in manuals used in then oversea colonies or protectorates (though I do not know whether this really happened a lot that history classes in Africa etc. were taught that way). But one century ago, people would consider it seriously. David.Monniaux 16:03, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Wrong: in the early centuries of the Christian era there were about ten million Gauls in the whole territory, which is a lot. So nos ancêtres les Gaulois is not just cited as a laughable nationalistic phrase. This may explain why the French hardly say nos ancêtres les Francs even if the Franks gave their name to the country.

Cleaning?

Can somebody clean up/check to improve the top section? It's awful in design and way too busy as is. --Circeus 16:23, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Translation in progress

This article is being translated to its counterpart at the Swedish Wikipedia. Any input on either translation or facts will be much appreciated. --karmosin 11:00, Feb 7, 2005 (UTC)

Translation is for now considered complete. More translations of French grammar might be of interest later, but the phonology will have to wait until a proper IPA-template has been created at Swedish wikipedia. --karmosin 15:41, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

2/3

Because of the Norman conquest, perhaps as much as two thirds of modern English comes from French.

I think the only way this could possibly be true is if it is limited to vocabulary. And I doubt even 2/3 of English words are derived from French. Does anyone have information on this?

What is the source for this claim? And what, specificially, does it mean? That 2/3 of English words are derived from French? That 2/3 of the grammar of English is French in origin? That 2/3 of English phonemes come from French? -- Temtem 20:41, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

I'm removing this claim until someone can come up with some support for it. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the vocabulary of English is about half Germanic and half Romance (including French and Latin). This says nothing of the language's grammar, morphology, phonology, etc. -- Temtem 02:15, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)

No worries: English grammar is Germanic, whereas a lot of the English vocabulary comes from Norman French and French, or direct from Latin but with a French format (2/3 for sure): defence/defense comes from Latin but you recognize the French format, otherwise the English word would be defensa. Just read: camera, armada, influenza don't look English, whereas chamber, army, influence may pass for pure English words; actually they are Latin words with a French format. But to English people who don't like the Latin world, i'd just say that French is the most Germanic of the Latin languages.

Native speakers in France

How can you say that all but 180,000 of the 60+ million residents of France are native speakers of French? (This info is in the table). Although many immigrants to France come from nominally French-speaking countries, many more do not and even for those that do come from countries where French may be used (Algeria and the like), it's very unlikely that in most cases French would be these immigrants' native (home) language. Does anyone have a link for how many native speakers of French there actually are in France? Moncrief 20:10, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

Romance expert's input required

I've started a page on The verb "to be" in Indo-European languages, which is intended to place the irregular paradigms in a historical context. Left to my own devices I will no doubt eventually get round to filling in the info on French, Spanish and Italian, but it would be better if one of you who is at home in the Romance field could go over there, check everything, complete the second table and make any necessary comments underneath it. And then, if and when you are happy that it is useful to you, link it from the various romance language sites. (My own area of competence, and the necessesity for starting the page in the first place, lie on the Germanic side!) --Doric Loon 21:07, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Actually, the more specific article Romance copula is where the detailed info on Frog belongs. — Chameleon 19:08, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

French in Canada

I do not understand where the number of 9,662,100 for native French speakers in Canada come from. Here are the numbers available from the Website of Statistics Canada:

Using the latest available census data (year 2001) for language by mother tongue, including single and multiple responses, we get 6,864,615. Population by mother tongue, by provinces and territories (2001 Census)

Using the latest available census data (year 2001) for knowledge of official language, including single and multiple responses, we get 9,178,100. Population by knowledge of official language, by provinces and territories (2001 Census)

If my numbers are correct there are 6,864,615 native French speakers in Canada.

Can someone confirm? If we all get this number, it should be inserted in the right place in the table. -- Mathieugp 22:20, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I have added the total number of people who selected French as a first language in any catagory (singular response and multiple response) and have came to the same conclusion of 6,864,615 native French speakers in Canada. - Dustin, dustin_bradley@web.de / 8. December 2005

The Franks

The information that "perhaps as much as 15 % of modern French comes from Germanic words" makes me suspicious. MS Encarta 04 states that "in modern French only about 400 words are of Germanic origin". Does anyone have further information? I dare not change it as there is still lack of knowledge as for myself.

It's very likely to be closer to 15% than to 400. Perhaps the 400 figure refers to words like "vassisdas" or "bretzel", which are directly from German, but if we are talking about words whose roots come from Frank language, there are probably much more of them. Rama 5 July 2005 21:26 (UTC)

Maybe there only are 2700 words in French? :) —Gabbe July 6, 2005 08:24 (UTC)

15% is probably wrong, although there are many Frankish words in French: meurtre, haie, heurt, bleu, blond, blanc, flèche, guet, gâcher, garde, honte, hanter, hardi, heaume, etc, even adverbs (trop, guère). Due to the incompatibility between Germanic and Latin phonems, it's sometimes hard to guess the Germanic root: gâcher comes from waskan (to wash) and guetter from wahton (to wait). Anyway, Frankish was hardly written, and even Germanic aristocrats could neither write nor read (neither could Charlemagne). On the other hand many people were bilingual and spoke both Gallo-Roman and Frankish, so that the Gallo-Roman language was deeply alterated by Frankish. For instance, the adjective haut takes a strong h because it's a mixture of Gallo-Roman alt and Frankish hoh (high), hence le Haut Rhin and not l'Haut Rhin

Pronunciation of the French name Hermite

The Wikipedia article titled Charles Hermite said:

Charles Hermite (pronounced "air meet") (December 24, 1822 - January 14, 1901) was a French mathematician who did research on number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra.

An anonymous editor changed "air meet" to "hair meet". Could someone who knows French well comment? Thanks. Michael Hardy 19:53, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

The H is completely silent, so I guess it's more like "air meet". ? SeeSchloß 08:36, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

/??arl ?r'mit/ is the correct french phonological transcription but since [r] and [?] are allophonic /??a?l ??'mit/ is valid too. So "air meet" is the closest thing that sounds like Hermite in French. No pronounced h. ---moyogo

Thank you. Michael Hardy 21:23, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for refering to this discussion page (after too hasty correcting the phonetics from "air meet" into "hair mit"). I agree that the H is not as strongly pronounced as in Eng.'house'; it is probably better to assume H in Hermite to be silent.

On the other hand the proposed double vowel EE as in MEET certainly sounds too long (if all French). In my opinion it should be closer to "i" as in "it". The particle Fr."mite" in Hermite is also quite close to "mit" in for instance Engl."permit". Compare with Fr."marmite" > according Larousse phonetically [marmit]. Plenty of exemples are available in the class of French nouns with suffix -ite > [...it], relating to a state of illness (as for instance meningitis > Fr. méningite). Finally, also note that in some French dialects the "t" in the suffix -ite is even shortly interrupted after the i, so that the ending -t is slightly accentuated [...i'te]. Proposal: "Hermite" for an English tongue, should preferably be written as [er* mit] (* marks here that a rolling r is (obviously) assumed). Best regards User:Witger

I think you're mistaken: the double "ee" in "meet" does NOT sound longer than the "i" in "mit". And they are NOT "quite close" to each other to English-speaking people, especially in a stressed syllable. Michael Hardy 20:45, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

To a native French speaker, "meet" is just "mit" with a long /i/, because french only has on phoneme for [i]-/i/. English has two [i]-/i/ and [?]-/?/. Many French speakers do not hear nor make the difference between [i] and [?], but they do notice the difference of lengthening when present. Therefore the argument for mit instead of meet is totally valid if you consider a French speaker and not an English speaker hearing capabilities. ---moyogo

Nonetheless

* I do not think that the vowel in meet has longer duration than that in mit. Consider seat and seed. The vowel in seed is longer in duration than that it seat, and that in Sid is longer than that is sit, but the vowels in sit and seat are equally long. And all of this is non-phonemic in English.

* This is English Wikipedia, written to be understood by those who understand English. I would not represent the sound of the name Jonah as it is pronounced in English by writing Dschoune, but it would perhaps be perfectly appropriate on German Wikipedia to say that that is how that name is pronounced in English. And the IPA is there too; that's just as useful for French-speaking people as for English-speaking people. Michael Hardy 22:32, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Just a comment: there is possibly a difference in vowel length in British English. According to the IPA chart for English, British English "meet" would be transcribed as [mi?t], and "mit" as [m?t]. I agree with you, of course, that it is probably more important to show vowel quality than length, and the IPA takes care of that anyway. Lesgles (talk) 06:24, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Geographic distribution

Niger is missing. French is their official language according to their wikipedia article. scazza 23:29, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

yes, Niger speaks French, and Nigeria English

French-origin words in Tagalog?

A list of Tagalog words supposedly taken from French was laid out in the Tagalog version of the “French language” article. We’re inviting anyone to please check the list in that article to verify whether these words actually do come from French. Thanks.

population

I adjusted the speaker population according to supported native-speaker figures. The figures for some of the countries had been exaggerated 10 times or more. What is there now is mostly from Ethnologue 15, but I used census data where I could find it (France, Canada, etc.). The figure for Belgium is 40% (from the 1960 census!) of the non-immigrant population. Using the 86% figure for France, this gives 66.4 million native speakers. One of the notes to the France demographics data says the %age would be closer to 90% if children were included. If this can be verified, that would bring the total up to 68.8 million. There are a couple editors who have inflated this figure to over 100M, so how about we keep a list here of our sources of data for future reference? kwami 04:46, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

The French language article over at fr.wikipedia.org says this:

"En 1998, le Haut Conseil de la Francophonie estimait les francophones « réels » à 112,6 millions auxquels il convient d'ajouter 60,6 millions de francophones qualifiés de « partiels » ou « occasionnels », soit 173,2 millions de francophones. De plus, 100 à 110 millions de « francisants », qui, citons ici le rapport officiel, « ont appris le français pendant plusieurs années et en ont gardé une maitrise variable, ou qui sont amenés à le pratiquer, même partiellement, pour leur métier. » Le même type d'étude avait été mené par ce même organisme en 1989 (rapport publié en 1990) avec 104,6 millions de francophones « réels » recensés plus 54,2 millions de « partiels », soit 158,8 millions de francophones. La progression enregistrée est importante avec un gain de 14,4 millions en 9 ans. 2 millions de ces « nouveaux » francophones sont des Français, démographie oblige, mais le gros du bataillon est fourni par le continent africain. En extrapolant ces chiffres, on peut estimer le nombre des locuteurs francophones à quelques 183 millions en 2005 et le nombre total de personnes aptes à s'exprimer en français à 290 millions."

Which roughly translates to:

"In 1998, the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie estimated the "real" francophones at 112.6 millions to which we can add some 60.6 million francophones which can be considered "partial" or "occasional" for a total of 173.2 million francophones. In addition, some 100 to 110 millions "francisants" which, says the same report, "have learned French over many years of study and have kept a variable ability to speak it or who practise it, sometimes partially, for their work. The same study conducted in 1989 had given 104.6 real francophones plus 54.2 million partials, therefore 158.9 million francophones. The progression that was recorded is important with a gain of 14.4 million in 9 years. 2 million of these "new" francophones are French, because of demography, but the bigger of the batallion was given by the African contient. By extrapolating these numbers, we can estimate the number of French speakers to some 183 million in 2005 and the total number of people able to express themselves in French to 290 million.

The article fr:Distribution des francophones dans le monde has details and a map as well as a link to the source however the link is broken. I found a more up to date source here:

http://www.francophonie.org/hcf/publications/

This is the actual site of the Francophonie and they provide a PDF of a report dated March 20, 2005:

http://www.francophonie.org/presse/dossiers/sup_20mars_2005.pdf

The numbers they give in the PDF are 115 million people able to "be confronted with common communication situations in French" and 60 million more with limited abilities for a total of 175 million. I would suggest using these figures. -- Mathieugp 22:55, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

I reverted the edit placing the number of total native speakers at over 200, which sounded exaggerated, but I agree with you that we should consider other sources, such as the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie. The only problem is how to list it. Should we stick with trying to list the numbers of native speakers? "Francophones réels" would seem to give something different, such as those who use French every day, although it is their second language (e.g., an Algerian living in France). Lesgles 16:52, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

If the ranking is by native language, then we should not use the 115 milion as it combines native + usage. However, I don't know where that 67 million number comes from. I have a source here which mentions 109 million counting only native French speakers worldwide.

http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/francophonie/francophonie.htm

Unfortunately, the page doesn't say what the source is for that number. At the bottom of the page it says "Dernière mise à jour: 25 mai 2005 " so I guess it is pretty recent. The site is a pretty solid source in my opinion. It called "L'aménagement linguistique" dans le monde. It is hosted on the Université Laval website and is made by some linguist named Jacques Leclerc. -- Mathieugp 04:05, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I wonder how accurate we can expect them to be if they can't even do arithmetic. Using the percentages they list {82% of France (I assume this includes all French possessions, because the census figure is 86% for metropolitan France), 23.2% of Canada, 41% of Belgium (this figure is from 1960, and might now be less due to immigration), and 18.4% of Switzerland} and population figures for 2005, there are 64.8 million native French speakers, but somehow they get 75 million. With their figure of 1.7 million in the USA, that's 66.5 million. Add in 0.2 million for North Africa and 0.1 million for Italy, and we're still under 67 million. I'm not aware of any other country that has a significant native speaking population, if you don't count Haitian creole.

An estimate was made on the List of languages by number of native speakers talk page with different data sources, and the result was 67.3 million. Ethnologue estimates 65 million.

The U Laval website doesn't say where the other 30 million are. kwami 05:46, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't know where the numbers come from. I presume you are not using the same absolute figures he is using, therefore your adding up of the percentages gives you a different result. I sent him an e-mail to ask him how he ended up with 75 and 109 million and if he could share his sources with us for Wikipedia. If I had a lot more time to waste on this, I would manually add up all the numbers myself using the index for Africa on the same site:

http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/afrique/afracc.htm

Each African state has its own demolinguistic description. -- Mathieugp 18:47, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I have received no reply from Jacques Leclerc... I guess we will have to stick with the current figures until we can find better, more accurate, and more recent ones. -- Mathieugp 13:54, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps part of the discrepency here is the statistics. How do we justify the statement that only 7,300 from approximately 450,000 Guadeloupians hold French as a native language ? Of course the majority of them speak French (I have only encountered very old or otherwise extremely poor people there with whom I could not communicate in French). Even if they are speaking creole at home French is still their language. The same thing goes for Martinique. ~ Dustin - dustin_bradley@web.de

If I understand the content of this page, WA seem to be the "bible" to have an idea of the number of native-speaker of a language! OK, then we should follow it for french. They speak of 77 M people ell over the world! It seems weak but we can trust it, I guess.

Shall we make the change now?

The other sources seem to be around 72 to 129 M (!) of speakers. 77 must be a minimum.195.188.208.250 10:46, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I can't do any editing - it says there's a spam problem on the page - but more of this uncertainty about numbers should be reflected in the article (I've more often seen French rated as the 11th or 10th most spoken, rather than the 15th). Santori 21:14, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Translation request

Bonjour mes amis wikipediennes! As you can see, my French skills are regrettably under par, and so I come here for help. I have an article, SYR1: Anagrama with some French text (song titles) in it for which I would like a translation. I don't know if putting the request here is the proper thing to do, but it seems logical to me. Anyway, I would be grateful if a French speaker could translate these titles for me and post them to my talk page. Merci! --Netvor | T | C 16:53, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Wow, that was fast. Many thanks to User:Jules.lt for the help. --Netvor | T | C 18:19, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

French Dictionnary (without English)

I'm tired of looking for a simple online dictionary. All I find is translators. I look for French dictionary and all I find is translators. I even search in French and it gives me this. I want a real French Dictionary, not an English-French Dictionnary. I would prefer it to be just like a normal dictionary, simple layout, like on paper. Does anybody know I can find an online French Dictionary?

The two main dictionary editors I know of, Larousse [1] and Le Robert [2] don't seem to offer full dictionaries online. Not even for a fee... --FvdP 17:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

The best French dictionary is undoubtedly the Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (TLFi), which is available (free) online at: http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm

* Le dictionnaire multifonctions de TV5 : http://dictionnaire.tv5.org (définitions, synonymes, conjugaisons, français-anglais, anglais-français)

* Le grand dictionnaire terminologique : http://www.granddictionnaire.com (contains quantity of terms not found in generalist dictionaries)

-- Mathieugp 19:37, 24 October 2005 (UTC)