French language
French is a Romance language that developed from Latin in France and is spoken as a first or official language in many countries.
French phonology: The sound system of French, including its consonants, vowels, stress patterns, and syllable structure. Nasal vowels and phrase-final stress give spoken French much of its characteristic sound.
Vulgar Latin: The nonliterary forms of Latin spoken across the Roman world, from which the Romance languages developed. Its spoken forms supplied the main linguistic foundation of French.
Organisation internationale de la Francophonie: An international organization that brings together governments and regions with shared ties to the French language. It coordinates cooperation among many states where French has cultural or official standing.
Occitan language: A Romance language historically spoken across southern France and neighboring regions. Its history alongside French reflects the long contest between regional languages and centralized standards.
French grammar: The rules governing French word forms, sentence structure, agreement, and grammatical relationships. Gender, verb conjugation, and agreement shape how French sentences are built.
Gaul: A region of western Europe inhabited by Celtic peoples and incorporated into the Roman Empire. Latin spread through Gaul and interacted with the languages already spoken there.
French language in Canada: The use and legal status of French in Canada, especially in Quebec and other francophone communities. Canadian French shows how the language adapts beyond Europe while retaining regional forms.
Breton language: A Celtic language spoken in Brittany, distinct from the Romance languages of France. Its survival highlights France's linguistic diversity beyond French.
French orthography: The conventions for writing French, including its spelling, accents, punctuation, and capitalization. French spelling preserves distinctions that pronunciation often no longer makes.
Old French: The earliest historical stage of French, spoken and written roughly from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. Its documents show French emerging as a distinct language from Gallo-Romance.