Ch 32 · Lesson 26French · Chapter 32 · Lesson 26 · Themed review
La francophonie du Sud
French in West and Central Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, where most of its speakers now live.
Practise this lesson
20-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Most French speakers are now African
Ask where French is spoken and most people say France. The real answer, more and more, is Africa.
The numbers
The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie counted about 320 million French speakers in the world in 2022. More than half of them, and about six in ten of the people who use French every day, live in Africa. By most counts the largest French-speaking city on Earth is no longer Paris but Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With Africa's young and growing population, the share is expected to keep rising.
Where
| Region | Countries and places | French there |
|---|---|---|
| West Africa | Senegal, Ivoire, Guinea, Benin, Togo and others | the official language of school, government and the press, beside local languages such as Wolof in Senegal; Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have recently made it a working language rather than an official one |
| Central Africa | the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Gabon and others | official, often with several other languages; Cameroon is officially bilingual with English |
| The Maghreb | Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia | not official, but widely used in business, universities and the , beside Arabic and Amazigh (Berber) |
| The Caribbean | Martinique, Guadeloupe; Haiti | Martinique and Guadeloupe are part of France; in Haiti, French and Haitian Creole are both official |
| The Indian Ocean | , Mayotte; Madagascar, Mauritius | French alongside Creole and Malagasy |
Mixing
In most of these countries French is not anyone's only language. A conversation in Dakar can move between Wolof and French in a single sentence; in Casablanca, between Moroccan Arabic and French. Linguists call it code-switching, and it is completely normal.
Words to listen for
| Where | Word | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Ivoire | On ? | how's it going? |
| West Africa | go | a girl, a girlfriend |
| Senegal | dibiterie | a grill house serving roast meat |
| Maghreb | wesh | hey, what's up (now heard all over France) |
Why it matters
African music, novels and films are some of the liveliest in French today, and more and more of them find their audience in France, not only the other way round. If you want to hear French spoken with energy, listen to RFI's African programmes, or to the music of Abidjan and Dakar. The behind it is colonial, and not a happy one; the language that came out of it now belongs to the people who speak it.