French people like to complain that the French language is under siege by English, the dominant language in the world. They talk about it as if the survival of French was at stake. In reality, the number of French speakers is growing in the world but it is particularly true in places you would not expect.

Official statistics count about two hundred million French speakers in the world, although seventy two million of them are classified as partial speakers. It is a 1st or 2nd language in more than 50 nations. French and English are the only 2 languages that are spoken on all continents

The French language is well alive and always evolving. Adoption of new words in the official dictionaries is up to the French Academy (l?Academie Francaise) an independent institution whose role it is to protect and control the evolution of the French language.

In France, even the government has stepped in to officially replace or encourage French people to use newly created French words to replace new English words that do not have an equivalent in French. Examples are ecourrier for e-mail, pourriel for spam.

Certain industries like advertising, broadcasting and certain commercial communications like billing statements and direction manuals have to be written in French. The French went so far as to amend their constitution in 1992 so that French is now the official language of the Republic.

Did you know that there are more French speakers in Africa than in Europe or any other place in the world? Actually 75% of French speakers reside in Africa. Even Canada with its more than 9 million French speakers is far behind and the USA only count 700,000 French speakers. In Europe, German is the most spoken language. French and Italian come in second and English is third.

The French language is well represented on the internet (5%) but still far behind English (45% of web pages) or even German (7%). It?s not so bad if you think that 90% of languages are not represented on the internet. It is also the second most learned foreign language in the world after English.

French was always the language of diplomacy. In the past, treaties between countries used to be written in French. It was spoken by the Tsars and Kings. Still today, it is one of the official languages of the United Nations and the African union. Because Pierre De Coubertin, a Frenchman, created the modern Olympics, it is its official language.

Because 3 out of 4 of the French speakers are located in countries with high birth rates, one can expect that the use of the French language is only going to keep growing. Africa for example counts the largest number of French speakers in the world and its population is supposed to double from 1995 to 2025, going from 728 millions to 1.49 billion.