French · Français

About French

Language family

Indo-European, Italic, Romance (Gallo-Romance)

Where it's spoken

France, Canada (Quebec), Belgium, Switzerland, much of West and Central Africa

Speakers

roughly 80 million native speakers and 300 million total

French developed from the Latin spoken in Roman Gaul, layered with Frankish (Germanic) influence, and was standardized around the Île-de-France dialect used in Paris. Colonial and diplomatic history spread it across West and Central Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of Canada, where it remains an official language today. It shares a large cognate vocabulary with the other Romance languages.