Languages of France

Languages of France
Of the languages of France, French is the sole official language according to the second article of the French Constitution. French, a Gallo-Romance language, is spoken by nearly the entire population of France.
In addition to French, several regional languages are also spoken to varying degrees, such as Alsatian, a Germanic dialect (specifically Alemannic) (spoken by 1.44% of the national population); Basque, a language isolate; Breton, a Celtic language (spoken by 0.61%); Corsican, an Italo-Dalmatian language; and various other Gallo-Romance languages (Langues d'Oïl 1.25%, Occitan 1.33%). Some of these languages are also spoken in neighbouring countries, such as Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy or Spain.
Status
The official language of the French Republic is French (art. 2 of the French Constitution) and the French government is, by law, compelled to communicate primarily in French. The government, furthermore, mandates that commercial advertising be available in French (though it can also use other languages). The French government, however, does not mandate the use of French by private individuals or corporations or in any other media.
A revision of the French constitution creating official recognition of regional languages was implemented by the Parliament in Congress at Versailles in July 2008.
The 1999 Report written for the government by Bernard Cerquiglini identified 75 languages that would qualify for recognition under the government's proposed ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Of those languages, 24 are indigenous to the European territory of the state while all the others are from overseas areas of the French Republic (in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean and South America).
Although ratification was blocked by the Constitutional Council as contradicting the Fifth Republic's constitutional provision enshrining French as the language of the Republic, the government continues to recognise regional and minority languages to a limited extent (i.e. without granting them official status) and the Délégation générale à la langue française has acquired the additional function of observing and studying the languages of France and has had et aux langues de France added to its title. The category of languages of France (in French: langues de France) is thus administratively recognised even if this does not go so far as to provide any official status. Following his election as president, François Hollande reasserted in 2012 his campaign platform to ratify the European Charter and ensure a clear legal framework for regional languages (within a programme of administrative decentralisation that would give competencies to the regions in language policy).
The regional languages of France are sometimes called patois, but this term (roughly meaning "dialects") is often considered derogatory. Patois is used to refer to supposedly purely oral languages, but this does not, for instance, take into account that Occitan was already being written at a time when French was not and its literature has continued to thrive, with a Nobel Prize for Frédéric Mistral in 1904.
It is estimated that at the time of the French Revolution in 1789, only half of the population of France could speak French, and as late as 1871 only a quarter spoke French as their native language.
Language education
The topic of the teaching of regional languages in public primary and secondary schools is controversial. Proponents of the measure state that it would be necessary for the preservation of those languages and to show respect to the local culture. Opponents contend that local languages are often non-standardised (thus making curricula difficult), of dubious practical usefulness (since most are spoken by a small number of people, without any sizable corpus of publications) and that the curriculum and funding of public schools are already too strained. The topic also leads to wider controversial questions of autonomy of the régions. Regarding other languages, English, Spanish, Italian and German are the most commonly studied foreign languages in French schools.
In April 2001, the Minister of Education, Jack Lang, stated formally that for more than two centuries, the political powers of the French government had repressed regional languages, and announced that bilingual education would, for the first time, be recognised, and bilingual teachers recruited in French public schools.
Cross-border languages
Some of the languages of France are also cross-border languages (for example, Basque, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, Franc-Comtois, Franco-Provençal, Norman, Picard, Occitan and others), some of which enjoy a recognised or official status in the respective neighbouring state or territory. French itself is also a cross-border language, being spoken in neighbouring Andorra, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, and Switzerland.
List of languages
According to the 2007 Adult Education survey, part of a project by the European Union and carried in France by the Insee and based on a sample of 15,350 people, French was the mother tongue of 87.2% of the total population, or roughly 55.81 million people, followed by Arabic (3.6%, 2.3 million), Portuguese (1.5%, 960,000), Spanish (1.2%, 770,000) and Italian (1.0%, 640,000). People who spoke other languages natively made up the remaining 5.2% of the population.
National language
French
Regional languages
The regional languages of Metropolitan France include:
Celtic
Breton (Brezhoneg)
Léonard (Leoneg)
Cornouaillais (Kerneveg)
Trégorrois (Tregerieg)
Vannetais (Gwenedeg)
Germanic
Alsatian (Elsässerditsch)
French Flemish: West Flemish dialect of Dutch
Lorraine Franconian (Lothringisch)
Yenish (Jenisch)
Italo-Dalmatian
Corsican (Corsu)
Gallo-Romance
Oïl language:
Berrichon
Bourguignon-Morvandiau
Champenois or Campanois
Franc-Comtois
French
Gallo
Lorrain
Norman
Picard
Poitevin-Saintongeais
Walloon
Angevin
Occitan language (also Lenga d'òc, Langue d'oc):
Vivaroalpenc
Mentonasc (Mentonnais or Mentonasque)
Auvergnat
Gascon including Béarnese (Béarnais) and Landese (Landais)
Languedocien
Limousin
Provençal
Nissart (Niçois or Niçart)
Catalan
Franco-Provençal (also Arpitan):
Bressan
Dauphinois
Forézien
Jurassien
Lyonnais
Savoyard
Italo-Romance
Gallo Italic
Ligurian language
Royasc
Others
Basque (Euskara)
Romani
Overseas languages
There are also several languages spoken in France's overseas areas (see Administrative divisions of France for details):
Amerindian languages in French Guiana
French-based creole languages in the French West Indies (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, and Saint Barthélemy), French Guiana, and Réunion (see: Antillean Creole, Haitian Creole, French Guiana Creole and Réunion Creole);
also Dutch, and English in Saint Martin;
also Saint-Barths Patois (local derivation from regional dialects of French in France), and English in Saint Barthélemy
Many Austronesian languages:
several languages in New Caledonia (see: New Caledonian languages, Loyalty Island languages)
two languages in Wallis & Futuna (see: Wallisian language, Futunan language)
many languages in French Polynesia (Tahitian and other Eastern Polynesian languages)
Shibushi in Mayotte
Shimaore (a Bantu language) in Mayotte
Sign language
French Sign Language is also recognised as a language of France (with at least one regional variant in Provence).
Immigrant languages
A large number of immigrant languages are spoken in France, with a handful having a significant number of home speakers. (Figures as of 2000)
Main immigrant languages
Arabic, especially the Maghrebi Arabic dialects, is the second-most common language in French homes, with several million speakers.
Berber languages (Tamazigh) from North Africans are one of the most spoken languages in France, about 2,200,000 speakers.
Italian: spoken by Italian communities in many major French cities, especially in southern regions, such as Nice, Savoie, and Corsica. About 790,000 speakers, excluding Italian dialects.
Portuguese: spoken by about 700,000 people.
English: significant British minorities in Aquitaine and Brittany, as well as commuters working in the UK but living in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Dispersed minorities in Paris and on the Côte d'Azur (French Riviera). The most widely taught foreign language in the French education system, but not widely used and understood except in specific job positions (chiefly technical and tourism). About 325,000 home speakers.
Polish: spoken by about 130,000 people
Turkish: spoken by about 221,000 people
Vietnamese: the most spoken Asian language in France, spoken by about 324,000 people
German and German dialects: spoken by about 300,000 people. Figure includes both standard German and other dialects of High German. See Alsatian and Lorraine Franconian, spoken respectively in Alsace and Lorraine.
Kurdish languages – 200,000 (2014 estimate)
Statistics
INSEE 1999
At the 1999 census, INSEE sampled 380,000 adult people all across Metropolitan France, and asked them questions about their family situation. One of the questions was about the languages that their parents spoke with them before the age of five. This is the first time serious statistics were computed about the proportion of mother tongues in France. The results were published in Enquête familiale, Insee, 1999.
Here is a list of the nine most prominent mother tongues in France based on Enquête familiale.
When the people with mother tongue and people with some exposure to the language before the age of five (see note #3 below) are added together, the five most widely spoken languages in metropolitan France are (note that the percentages add up to more than 100, because many bilingual people are now counted twice):
French: 42,100,000 (92%)
Occitan: 1,670,000 (3.65%)
German and German dialects: 1,440,000 (3.15%)
Oïl languages (excl. French): 1,420,000 (3.10%)
Arabic: 1,170,000 (2.55%)
Notes on the table
The data in the table are about mother tongues, and not about actual language practice. It states that 14% of the adult people living in France in 1999 were born and raised up to the age of 5 in families that spoke only (or predominantly) some other languages than French. It does not mean that 14% of adult people in France spoke some other languages than French in 1999.
Only adults (i.e. 18 years and older) were surveyed. This means that French people born between 1981 and 1999 are not included in the survey. The mother tongue of the younger generations is more predominantly French than is the case with the older generations because, as the Enquête familiale survey explains, regional and immigrant language transmission decreases dramatically with each new generation, as French replaces the regional and immigrant languages. In the Enquête familiale survey, only 35% of parents whose mother tongue was a regional or immigrant language reported that they spoke that language to their children. Thus, the 86% figure of people with French as their mother tongue is an underestimate because the younger generations whose predominant mother tongue is French are not counted.
The concept of "mother tongue" may not give a complete idea of the phenomenon of minority languages in France. This is because there are many people who were born and raised in families in which parents spoke to them only (or predominantly) French, but in which some regional or immigration languages were also occasionally used. One example: while the data shows that 610,000 adults in 1999 had one of the Occitan dialects as their mother tongue, the survey also found out that another 1,060,000 adults were born and raised in families in which one of the Occitan dialects was occasionally spoken. Some of these 1,060,000 people may speak Occitan as fluently as the 610,000 people who have it as a mother tongue, while some other (the majority, probably) have only a limited knowledge of Occitan. That 1,670,000 adults are speakers of Occitan cannot be corroborated, but it may be the case that the total number of people with some form of exposure to Occitan is higher than the 610,000 figure, though some of may have stopped using the language altogether since then.
Ethnologue, Metropolitan France
The following languages are listed as having 50,000 or more total speakers in Metropolitan France according to the 2022 edition of Ethnologue. Entries identified by Ethnologue as macrolanguages (such as Arabic, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese, encompassing all their respective varieties) are not included in this section.
See also
Culture of France
Francophonie
French language in Canada
Gaulish
History of French
Languages of the European Union
Law French
Old Frankish
Old French
Old Occitan
Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts
Notes
References
External links
Map of languages of France (clickable map)
Ethnologue report for France
Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France
Langues de France
Ikastola Elkartea association of bilingual Basque-French schools
Diwan Breizh association for promotion of Breton
Calandreta association of bilingual Occitan-French schools
La Bressola Catalan schools
Tlfq.ulaval.ca
Frédéric Vernier, Philippe Boula de Mareüil and Albert Rillard (Laboratoire UPR3251 - CNRS), Atlas sonore des langues régionales de France (2017)