French

Also known as French language

Romance language

AI overview

French is a Romance language—meaning it evolved from Latin and is related to Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. It matters because it's spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide and serves as an official language for many countries and international organizations.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Wikidata facts

Part of: Oïl
Image: JO199411392.png

Show 17 more facts

native label: langue française
Commons category: French language
short name: французская
Wikimedia language code: fr
exact match: publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/FRA
P10369: England
number of speakers, writers, or signers: 153299770
P8168: EFL Cup
P11012: Pacific Ocean
entry in abbreviations table: fr.
social media followers: 186974
P13311: Mars
Stack Exchange tag: linguistics.stackexchange.com/tags/french
Stack Exchange site URL: french.stackexchange.com
female form of label: la langue française
male form of label: le français
NCI Thesaurus ID: C123785

Sources (15)

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Article

French (français [fʁɑ̃sɛ] or langue française [lɑ̃ɡ fʁɑ̃sɛːz] ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, French and its closest relatives—the langues d'oïl, historically spoken in northern France and southern Belgium—descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Over time, French largely supplanted these regional relatives.

It was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul and by the Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, it was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole, were developed. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.