The French Language: The Brutal History of the Language of Love

Will French become the world's lingua franca (again)?! 👉🏼 https://youtu.be/bF-4ZmUdB1E

The fact that I'm a french watching a video in english about french language and I'm learning things is great. I've really enjoyed this video.

The Office de la Langue Française, in Québec, is even more extreme than l'Académie Française in preserving the "purity" of the language: with modernity, new words associated with new technologies are making their way into the French language, mostly from English, but have been officially replaced with French sounding equivalents, such as "email" that became "courriel", "web" became "toile", and many others, though in every day life lots of people "still" use the English version. This process always have the blessings of l'Académie Française of course.

As a french born and raised in Alsace (where we speak a dialect) I'm mixed on the academie française. Some rules and words are odd and since I speak a mix of french and german (alsacian dialect) I enjoy that the language is beeing simplified, but men, sometimes it feels like we're also simplifying too much of it

"Louisiana was colonized by French Canadians" -- summarizing history into one sentence will make you make mistaken statements like this. Louisiana was a French colony before the Acadians were expelled from what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. And actually was a Spanish colony when the Acadians went there. Louisiana French is not a monolith, as the Acadian dialect was different from the French spoken by the planter class. And of course since many enslaved peoples and indigenous peoples were forced to adopt French that had effects. Later on many people speaking Haitian Creole came and that had effects on Louisiana Creole. Listen to some Cajun music and zydeco and you'll hear the differences.

In fact Grenon and Gruesch are not used anymore, but most of the vocabulary about agriculture and countryside lifestile comes from Gaul, like all of our nautical vocabulary comes from Viking

As someone who’s been learning french for the past 6 years, the accents were never a problem.

As a french, I think removing the use of circumflex accents is a bit sad. It's one of the things that makes the french language kinda pretty i think

Kiwi here who lived in France for a decade or so; familiar with the terms Langue d'oc and Langue d'oil and what they reference but never knew the origin of these terms (along with a thousand other things, just missed the opportunity to ask anyone). Really interesting! How real history and human migration influenced language and culture is pretty much my favourite thing so thanks a million for this tasty morsel. Chouette, merci et Kapai!

I love your enthusiasm! I have been teaching French for 30 years. This is so interesting and informative! Merci bien!

Really nice to hear you talking about French, the language that I love. Although I am from India and I learnt English before French, the latter has her attractiveness that I cannot overlook and charmingly beckons to us to approach her, oggle her beauty and enjoy using her to communicate.

Great video! Just one minor correction : No other changes were added in 2016, it's just that the French education system decided to apply the changes that were decided in 1990 to the curriculum (of the Northern French-speaking countries, they were the last to do that). I also have to add those changes are optional, and people can continue to write with traditional spelling if they want.

11:00 I'm french and I actually didn't know we removed the accents lol I still use them

I was just starting to learn French, good timing

Great presentation....I am french from Montreal Quebec and my other side of my family are in Normandy France. I can tell you each time I visit them we have our cultural situation.....Very funny

Merci pour cette vidéo, elle est très intéressante et informative. Le français est une langue très unique et extraordinaire, qui n'est pas comme d'autres langues (à mon avis). Il est riche d'historique et a fait une grande influence pour la plupart de langues et cultures modernes du monde. Je l'adore beaucoup. Grâce à lui, je suis devenu obsédé avec des choses françaises. J'habite en Indonésie et j'y suis natif, j'espère qu'un jour, je pourrais visiter la France, le pays de mon rêve. Mais j'aimerais aussi visiter d'autres pays/lieux francophones comme la Belgique, la Suisse, le Québec, et quelques pays Africains francophones.

OMG ! Here's my last name in your vidéo ! I'm from Quebec so I'm happy to learn about the celtic origin of my name! And no, I'm not a big fan of the academy, we speak almost our own dialect here in Quebec derived from middle french, though our schooling is in international French. Really good video thank you !

Very few people will learn a language simply because it sounds nice to them. Greek, Latin, French and English each became Lingua Franca's due to their usefulness to the people of that time. I don't see France or Quebec gaining enough economic or cultural significance in the near future to sway the rest of the world to speak French. The best bet for French to become the next Lingua Franca is if French speaking parts of Africa became the dominant economic or cultural superpower of the world. There's a lot of potential for Africa to grow in the future.

I am a polyglot and I purposely avoided French. I am glad my daughter is now fluent in it. She speaks English, Hindi, Icelandic and French fluently.

So interesting. My husband had to learn French as the second language in school in Zambia (Southern Africa) and my in-laws lived in Cameroon which is mostly French speaking however it has a small Anglophone region. Sadly they had to move out for now and stay in Malawi as civil war broke out due to language. Anglophones felt mistreated because they were not getting the same education and rights as Francophones so they tried to separate and be their own country (I’m simplifying what is surely more complex but the major issue comes down to language). Hopefully someday soon the war will end and my in laws can move back. They had to abandon everything which was in their home it was all so sudden.