The French language is a world language and aside from German and English the most important language of the European Union.
Though French is spread over some parts of the world above all in Africa it could not enforce to be offical language in former colonies in contrast to Spanish and English. read more...
In total about 76 million people speak French as primary language. Furthermore 110 million use French as secondary language. Its origin is lying in Latin, like all Romanic languages and has got influences from Greek. These origins only exist in grammatically and phonetically changes.
The sound structure is marked by the fusion of vowels followed by consonants. Consonants at the end of words are often only spoken if the next word begins with a vowel.
This is a specialty within the French language - the fusion of different words to one phonetic unit. The French word structure only allows few variations because several consonants in one word are rarely used. Therefore many equal words with different meanings that opens up out of context or pronunciation exist. The accentuation lies on the last syllable.
French written form is totally different from the spoken language because all mutely vowels or non-spoken consonants are not existent in the written form. In contrast to German French only knows two grammatically genders, masculine and feminin. A neuter does not exist.
