This began in 1794 with Henri Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the use of the French language".
By the early 1800s, Parisian French had become the primary language of the aristocracy in France. Near the beginning of the 19th century, the French government began to pursue policies with the end goal of eradicating the many minorities and regional languages (patois) spoken in France.
French also survived in isolated pockets along the Gulf Coast of what was previously French Lower Louisiana, such as Mon Louis Island, Alabama and DeLisle, Mississippi (the latter only being discovered by linguists in the 1990s) but these varieties are severely endangered or presumed extinct. French is one of Haiti's two official languages.
It noted that French is spreading in areas where the population is rapidly increasing, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In the European Union, French was once the dominant language within all institutions until the 1990s.
It is the sole internal working language of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and makes with English the European Court of Human Rights's two working languages. In 1997, George Werber published, in Language Today, a comprehensive academic study entitled "The World's 10 most influential languages".
According to the 2000 United States Census, there are over 194,000 people in Louisiana who speak French at home, the most of any state if Creole French is excluded.
After several enlargements of the EU (1995, 2004), French significantly lost ground in favour of English, which is more widely spoken and taught in most EU countries.
In French Polynesia, the percentage of the population who reported that French was the language they use the most at home rose from 67% at the 2007 census to 74% at the 2017 census.
In Wallis and Futuna, the percentage of the population who reported that French was the language they use the most at home rose from 10% at the 2008 census to 13% at the 2018 census. === Future === The future of the French language is often discussed in the news.
In a 2008 reassessment of his article, Werber concluded that his findings were still correct since "the situation among the top ten remains unchanged." Knowledge of French is often considered to be a useful skill by business owners in the United Kingdom; a 2014 study found that 50% of British managers considered French to be a valuable asset for their business, thus ranking French as the most sought-after foreign language there, ahead of German (49%) and Spanish (44%).
In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese. ==History== French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France.
For example, in 2014, The New York Times documented an increase in the teaching of French in New York, especially in K-12 dual-language programs where Spanish and Mandarin are the only second-language options more popular than French.
In a study published in March 2014 by Forbes, the investment bank Natixis said that French could become the world's most spoken language by 2050.
In a 2008 reassessment of his article, Werber concluded that his findings were still correct since "the situation among the top ten remains unchanged." Knowledge of French is often considered to be a useful skill by business owners in the United Kingdom; a 2014 study found that 50% of British managers considered French to be a valuable asset for their business, thus ranking French as the most sought-after foreign language there, ahead of German (49%) and Spanish (44%).
In 2016, schoolbooks in France began to use the newer recommended spellings, with instruction to teachers that both old and new spellings be deemed correct. ==Grammar== French is a moderately inflected language.
In French Polynesia, the percentage of the population who reported that French was the language they use the most at home rose from 67% at the 2007 census to 74% at the 2017 census.
According to a 2018 estimate from the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, an estimated 141 million African people spread across 34 countries and territories can speak French as either a first or a second language.
A country's status as an associate state also does not give a country voting abilities but associate states can discuss and review organization matters. ===Oceania and Australasia=== French is an official language of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, where 31% of the population was estimated to speak it in 2018.
In Wallis and Futuna, the percentage of the population who reported that French was the language they use the most at home rose from 10% at the 2008 census to 13% at the 2018 census. === Future === The future of the French language is often discussed in the news.
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