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French: French Language
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In Asia, French was the official language in Lebanon along with the Arabic Language until 1941, the country's declaration of independence from France. Still, French is widely used by the Lebanese and is taught in schools as a primary language along with Arabic. French is ... spoken by many immigrants of French or Maghrebin origin and their descendants in Israel.
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About 7 million Canadians are native French-speakers, of whom 6 million live in Quebec [3], and French is one of Canada's two official languages (the other being English). Various provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms deal with Canadians' right to access services in both languages, including the right to a publicly funded education in the minority language of each province, where numbers warrant in a given locality. By law, the federal government must operate and provide services in both English and French, proceedings of the Parliament of Canada must be translated into both these languages, and most products sold in Canada must have bilingual labels.
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French vocabulary is mostly Latin-based, e.g., frère "brother" from Latin frater. As a result, it shares much of its basic vocabulary with other Romance languages. A study by Walter and Walter (1998) estimated that 12% of common French words found in a typical dictionary such as the Petit Larousse were borrowed from other languages. About 25% of these loanwords are fairly recent borrowings from English (e.g., le rostbif, le weekend). Other languages that have contributed to the French lexicon are Italian, ancient Germanic languages, ancient Romance languages, Arabic, German Celtic, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Persian and Sanskrit (cited in Wikipedia).
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Oh, forget it. Even the French don't speak French. Haven't you seen films where the French just speak English with a dodgy accent? It's all true. All this "French" stuff is just put on to annoy the tourists. Only the Québécois speak French, and they do it just to piss you off. The true French language consists of a series of popping noises similar to morse code made with one's mouth.
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French is used as the official language of 22 countries and is the co-official language of several others, including Belgium, Canada, Haiti, Madagascar, and Switzerland. It is spoken as a first language by 51 million people in France and Corsica; in Canada by 7.2 million; in Belgium by 3.3 million; in Switzerland by 1.2 million; in Monaco by 17,000; in Italy by 100,000; and in the United States by nearly 2 million (primarily in Maine and Louisiana). In sub-Saharan Africa, some 5 million people (in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, and Zaire) use French as their principal international language, as do additional millions in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). In addition, French continues to be spoken as a second language by many people incountries located along the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean that were once French colonies or territories (notably Algeria. Morocco, and Lebanon).
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Apart from annoying tourists, the French believe that French should be the international language of diplomacy. This... would not work as it would create more wars as the ambassadors would not be able to agree on the gender of the nouns, whether or not the adjective genders agreed with the nouns, and whether the verb endings were correct. As a case study, French was the international diplomatic language in the 18th and 19th century; This is a time at which all the major colonial powers (England, France, Germany .etc) were at constant war.
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French Language