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French: Modern French
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In Africa, French speaking countries generally have a higher profile on the web and greater institutional connectivity than the non-French speaking countries. In Cameroun UNITAR and ORSTOM have collaborated in a joint project focusing on technical capacity building in Sub-Saharan francophone Africa. Of university web sites in Sub-Saharan Africa, 20 come up in French as their primary language. If you add in some North African countries like Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, the number goes way up. In some of the Francophone countries which had used Minitel, X.25 packet-switched based services (impractical in modern public Internet because of high-cost and traffic-based tariffs) are now used by banks and other large corporations requiring secure real-time low-volume data transactions such as credit card verification. In spite of very low wages, superstructure and other difficulties, Francophone African in countries like Sénégal, Morocco, and Bénin, well over 5% of the population were Internet users in 2005.
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Modern French belongs to the group of so-called “Romance” languages. Descended from Latin, these languages may be said to represent living shadows of the ancient Roman empire, reflecting the divergent histories of regions formerly unified under Roman rule.
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French is descended from Vulgar Latin, the vernacular Latin (as distinguished from literary Latin) of the Roman Empire (see Latin language). When ancient Gaul (now modern France) was conquered by the Romans in the 2d and 1st cent. B.C., its inhabitants spoke Gaulish, a Celtic language, which was rapidly supplanted by the Latin of the Roman overlords. In the 5th cent. A.D. the Franks, a group of Germanic tribes, began their invasion of Gaul, but they too were Romanized. Although modern French ... inherited several hundred words of Celtic origin and several hundred more from Germanic, it owes its structure and the greater part of its vocabulary to Latin.
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French, as it is spoken today by a vast Francophone population, began to become standardized with Charlemagne's conquest of the Gauls and Franks in the 16th Century. The history of the modern French language in France emerged with the combination of Latin and Provençal. Keep reading to learn more.
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Modern French