One of the Gallo-Romance languages, which belong to the Roman subgroup of Indo-European languages, French is spoken by approximately 100 million people worldwide. Apart from the official 60 million speakers in France, Southern Belgium, Luxembourg, Western Switzerland, Canada and Val D’aosta of Italy have about 5 million speakers each.
The earliest evidence of spoken French can be traced back to the 1st century B.C when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul and brought in Romans who spoke the Vulgar Latin language. This later branched into a number of dialects in ancient France. The history of the French language can be classified into four periods – Old French, Middle French, Classical French and Modern French.
In the 9th century, languages in France got divided into two major groups – the Langue d’oil in the north occupied by the Franks and Langue d’oc in the south, along with a small group of the Franco-Provençal in central France. From the 10th century onwards, Francien (a language from the Langue d’oil group) became increasingly popular, till it was finally established as Parisian French.
French continued to be popular between the 14th and 16th centuries. According to the royal verdict through the Ordonnances of Viller-Cotterêrs in 1539, Latin was replaced by French, which was now promoted as a local language. It was further simplified for ease of usage in 1549 and was even recognized as a language comparable to Latin and Greek.
Between the 17th and 18th centuries, French became exceedingly popular and widely used across Europe. The year 1635 saw the birth of the French Academy – an effort to improve the language and make grammar books and dictionaries available to the people. By the mid 17th century, French gained the status of the only international language used in European courts and helped forge international diplomacy.
Following the laws devised by Jules Ferry between 1881 and 1886, it was announced that French was to be the only language for all educational levels. Since then, French has been the educational language of France. In 1992, French was declared the official language of France by the French Constitution.
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