French basically is a Romance language. It means that the language originated from Roman language; Latin. Getting in touch with such romance language would be easier when one opts to learn French.

Language Classification

• Whether one learn French online or in the class rooms, it would be good knowing about the family classification of the languages.
• French language belongs to the family of Indo European and Italic Language.
• Its origin from Latin and Roman language has classified the language as Romance language.
• Indo European happens to be the largest linguistic family in the world.
• Such languages include European, American, and Asian languages including Latin, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, and Russian.
• Italic usually means Latin.

Evolution of Romance Languages

• Romance languages originally evolved in the Western part of Europe.
• Due to colonialism they spread all over the world.
• A good many countries all over the world use Romance languages.
• Romance languages are mostly based on Latin as their sources.

French as Romance Language

Although French is one of the Romance languages of the world it is vastly different from other such languages.

• Important linguistic difference between North and South France exists in respect of French language.
• Ligurians’ language used in the Southern part of the country constitutes Vulgar Latin.
• Gaulish language used in the Northern part of the country constitutes Celtic dialects.
• Latin had more influence over the South than over the North in France.
• After the German Frankish invasion in 400 A.D there were some major influences on grammar, punctuation, as well as vocabularies in the French romance language.

Dialectical Divisions of French Language

When someone decides to learn French language, he or she may like to have an overview of the dialectal regions of the language. Linguistic as well as cultural split had led to three dialectal regions in the arena of French language. These were –

• Langue d’oil that was widely used in the Northern parts of the country.
• Langue d’oc that was used in the Southern parts of the country.
• Franco provencal that was used in Eastern parts of the country.
• First two dialectal regions are called oil in the north and oc in the south.
• Provencal that was used in the middle part of the country was sort of intermediary.
• Subsequently the three main dialectal regions broke up into numerous sub-dialectal regions.
• Such sub-dialectal regions were variedly named as Parisian French, Picard, and Limousin and so on.
• Political importance of the Parisian region resulted in language d’ oil becoming the dominant dialect in the entire country eventually.
• Yet there are no less than 70 different dialects spoken in France today.

Speaking French

It does not mean that a person that desires to learn to speak French will have to be conversant with all the seventy dialects operative in the country. Becoming conversant with the language d’ oil dialect would be sufficient for the purpose as major part of the country uses this particular dialect. Of course the new learner may find some problems in the regions along the border like Basque, Alsatian, Breton, and Provencal where some specific dialect is operative.

Historical Evolution of French

• Charlemagne in the 9th century tried to revive interest in Latin with several renaissance attempts.
• But by that time average Frenchmen had started speaking the old French instead of Latin.
• Middle French replaced old French in the 14th century. It became the official and administrative language of France in 1539.
• French language was still evolving in 17th century and first French dictionary was published in 1606. However the widely accepted dictionary was published in 1694 for the first time.
• Since that time the French language has been growing and evolving. Numerous words have been incorporated by the immigrants from North Africa and English speaking countries.
• Having some basic knowledge of English and African languages can make one learn French easy.

French language that is spoken in France today is a mix of multiple dialects. It includes many other languages besides English as one of its primary components.