Fresh As French

By Jan Angelo

The French language has been around for centuries, being born of Latin and influenced by few other age old Celtic languages of Roman Gaul and the Germanic language of the Roman Frankish invaders. Even though French is a few centuries old it has always managed to retain its freshness.

If you speak French you would be feeling at home in 29 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas where French is the official language. The good news doesn't stop there; French is also being spoken in 54 other countries making the number of French speakers all over the world close to half a billion. Countries like Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in the European Union has French as one of their official languages in addition to their native official language. In Canada French is one of the two official languages, the other one being English.

The continent of Africa has a good majority of French speaking people, thanks to the French invasion back in the 18th and 19th centuries. The same can be said about a few countries in Asia like India, Singapore, Lebanon, Laos and Cambodia. Even in the United States of America English is the most spoken language, followed by Spanish and French. Technically speaking French is becoming a very important language in the present era; it is advised to start learning French as soon as possible before it is too late to sit down and worry that you didn't.

Learning French isn't very difficult as many of us would imagine, French has the very same 26 letters derived from the Latin alphabet as we do have in English with five diacritics and two ligatures in addition. If you thought that pronouncing the different French words would be impossible think again, thanks to the grave and acute accents used in French words learning the pronunciation of French words will be purely fun. The French have the habit of borrowing many words from other languages and 25% of the words come from English while others come from Arabic, German, Spanish, Italian, Persian and Sanskrit to name a few.

Jan Angelo is an Online Marketing Consultant. You can read his review of Rocket French by clicking on Rocket French