Talk:African French

message: Being a member of La Francaphonie requires cultural, not linguistic, links to France.  The list definitely needs an explanation at the top about this - and maybe the list should be removed altogether.  It's just misleading. Gronky 14:07, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  I'm not sure La Francaphonie is relevent 

message: Although is an official language in that country, it´s hardly used. They mostly speak Spanish, also Bubi and Fang, but French is only spoken by Camerunese inmigrants. Somebody should put a parenthesis saying: (Official but hardly used).
Yeah, and also it says that 60% of Equatoguineans are able to speak French... I doubt that this would be true.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.16.87.124 (talk) 23:58, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Equatorial Guinea 

message: It would be good to include the french dialect spoken in Libreville(Gabon) too  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.79.57.106 (talk) 01:59, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Libreville 

message: In the article I read, 94.5% of the population can speak French either as a first or second language.
I must admit that I am somewhat surprised, where is that figure from? I am tempted to say that everybody speaks French on reunion island, but I could be very wrong.
But I am curious, what else do the 5.5% of the population speak?
What would be the first language of those that only speak French as a second language?
I am guessing that Creole would be an obvious answer, but as the Creole from Reunion Island is so close to French I find it very hard to believe the figure of 94.5%.
With that in mind, where do all of the other numbers come from? I checked the reference for Mayotte, (after a bit of digging further), and it looks about right, but I am not sure about any of the others. FFMG (talk) 13:52, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Really? A reference to a book on Amazon.com. Do you really think it is good enough for Wikipedia? Do you have at least the page numbers where those numbers were taken from? I think they would help a lot. FFMG (talk) 14:56, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where are some of those numbers from? 

message: I have some trouble with this section:
 A third phenomenon is hypercorrection, which is found especially among the educated and upper
 classes of sub-Saharan Africa. Educated people there tend to speak a very formal sort of
 French which may sound a bit old fashioned and conservative to European and North American
 French speakers. This is somewhat similar to the way English is spoken by people of the upper
 class in India.
Is hypercorrection really correct in this case? As far as I have understood it, hypercorrection refers to a linguistic mistake made while trying to avoid a perceived other linguistic mistake. Really formal language can't be considered hypercorrect, as long as it is correct. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 12:36, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess what the author wants to say that it is incorrect to use very formal language in informal situations. Aaker (talk) 19:09, 25 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know, if anything, it seems like ignorance of French stylistic levels, but not hypercorrection per se. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * (talk) 14:38, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Hypercorrection

message: I will admit, most of these figures are rather unrealistic but what I am really curious about is how many people speak French as a first language. The article always combines both first and second speakers of French but how about come numbers about who many speak it as a mother tongue or as a working language.ThisguyYEAH (talk) 13:40, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The truth is that nobody knows how many they are because nobody has counted them. Many people grow up speaking indigenous languages in their families and later use French in school and at work. Often they develop much better literal proficiency in French than in their native languages. In informal contexts different languages are often mixed in a variety of ways. There are at least three contradicting trends in Francophone Africa today: 1. the increased use of French at all levels of society because of the progress of education and increased use of the written word as well as improved communication and media technologies. 2. Increased awareness of the importance of English (which by the way has so far manifested itself as a credible threat only in Rwanda which has a particular history). 3. Increased awareness of the indigenous languages value. Numerous, but by no means sufficient measures are being made in order to preserve and develop the native African languages. To sum up, the number of languages spoken in Africa is likely to decrease sharply as a consequence of urbanisation and the demographic transition and the most likely scenario is that French will co-exist with a rather small number of (bigger) indigenous languages. In this environment it will be interesting to see in what degree people will adopt the bigger indigenous languages (as in Kinshasa) or go directly to French (as in Abidjan). Anyway, the number of native French speakers will increase due to the language's privileged position and sadly it will be to the expense of indigenous African languages. A better alternative would have been to appreciate people's native languages and develop policies for multilingualism, where French could be kept as lingua franca/language for international communication, but most African countries do not have enough of resources to implement such policies so they prioritise more urgent issues. Aaker (talk) 22:52, 13 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Native French. 

message: It North African Word
الأفارقة الفرنسيون--OSAKA_JET 01:43, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Insert Arabian Word Please 

message: If you compare Belgian French to French French you will find some different expressions and words ... soixante-dix and septantante, for example. Both words are considered French language, but from a differing tradition. Then take the section on the Democratic Republic of Congo - all the examples are just Lingala words ... they are not French at all. If a government minister used that type of French, it wouldn't be accepted. Understand that the development of the country includes business meetings and conferences with other Francophone groups from other countries. Speaking French has got to be mutually intelligible - just throwing in lots of a different language and saying ... that's how we speak French here, is not understood by anyone who speaks French. In other words, Wikipedia has allowed another nonsense article to be produced. Yes, there is something that can be considered as "African French" - usually it would include older obsolete or little used expressions, but this article doesn't describe it yet. Francis Hannaway (talk) 23:21, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  I'm sure a serious article could be made of this ... but it hasn't happened yet. 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Most of the article is original research and either unreferenced or poorly referenced.
While it may be true that in a lot of French is spoken, I would estimate that here in the Democratic Republic of Congo fluency in French cannot exceed 20% of the population - probably less. The idea that a French person could arrive here and survive by speaking French, is far fetched. People's first languages are tribal language - probably a few hundred, after that people speak one (or more) of the national languages - after that they might speak French (after a fashion!). 
The other thing that could be mentioned is that DRC French is Belgian French. Francis Hannaway (talk) 07:53, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I totally agree with Francis that most of the numbers are vastly exaggerated. 74% of the population speaking French in the Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa) is absolute fantasy. Such a number may be desired by politicians and others from the upper and middle classes but is very far from reality. Another problem is the question how fluent people are. Maybe 74% are able to say "bonjour, ça va" but not much more. —Tuncker (talk) 09:07, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original research 

message: Why is Egypt included but not Lebanon? Lebanese children and teens learn French at school.
:Perhaps because Egypt is in Africa and Lebanon isn't? ព្រះមហាក្សត្ររាជ (talk) 17:03, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Egypt 

message: Are the African French dialects part of a larger dialect family in a linguistic sense or is African French a purely geographical grouping like Canadian French where most, if not all of the dialects within it aren't related linguistically beyond being dialects of French? ~Red of Arctic Circle System (talk) 12:03, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are African French dialects related to each other linguistically beyond being dialects of French? 

message: Men 197.250.225.154 (talk) 10:07, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Donner Des informations 

message: T
The paragraph where V.Y.Mudimbe is quoted seems biased and low-key racist. It comes out of the blue and presents a single opinion with no further discussion. The terms "repressed", "bloated", "tortured", "stuck" cannot appear in any serious writing in linguistics. The fact that french grammar is complex is questionable (compared to what standard?) and the assertion that this inhibits learning by most non-native speakers even more so. ContiNuziali (talk) 18:47, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  V. Y. Mudimbe quote