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Dialects of the French Language
Such as Spanish and Portuguese, French is a very important Romance language. There are 77 million native French speakers, or "Francophone" (stats from 1999). If we sum 2nd language speakers, there are 128 million Francophone overall. It makes French the 11th most spoken language worldwide. A lot of communities and organizations, such as The United Nations, IOC, the European Union and the Universal Postal Union have French as their official language.Although French is the most widely spoken and the only language officially recognised in France, numerous dialects are spoken all around the country. Some of them are historical regional languages which aren't of primary importance, others derive directly from the languages spoken by immigrants.
Belgian French
This dialect is similar to standard French, actually the two are mutually intelligible, apart from small differences, in the vocabulary mostly. For example, in both standard and Swiss French, the word for "seventy" is "septante", while in Belgian French it is "soixante-dix", which literally means "sixty-ten". In the same way, "nonante" is the standard for "ninety", which in Belgian is "quatre-vingt-dix", literally meaning "four score and ten".There are also minor differences like pronunciation, for example the letter "w", which in France is "v", in Belgian is pronounced in the English way. In any case, they are not striking differences, as they more or less correspond to variations between the dialects of different cities in France (e.g. the pronunciations in Marseille and Paris).
African French
Due the colonization by France and Belgium, French is spoken by many people in Africa. It makes Africans an important part of the French speaking population. Between the different countries exist local variations.Cajun French
Cajun French derives from Acadian, a French dialect which is spoken in Canada's coast Provinces and in the state of Maine. The name comes from the English pronunciation of word "Acadien" in French. Today Cajun is mainly spoken in the American state of Louisiana.Quebec French
According a survey carried out in 2001, 82.8% of people in the Canadian state of Quebec speak a variety of French which is called Quebec French (also Québécois French). In 2004, about 6,700,000 Canadians had French as their first language.Vietnamese French
Spoken in Vietnam, it originated from the French rule of 1884. It was also influenced by a variety of languages like French, Vietnamese, Javanese, English, Portuguese and Cantonese. Before 1954, year on which the French left Vietnam, Vietnamese French was the language for interaction between French and Vietnamese people. Nowadays, the standard French is used in Vietnamese education, and in other schools it's studied as a second language.Swiss French
Swiss French, which is spoken in the Francophone part of Switzerland, is very similar to standard French. This means that a speaker of Swiss French is able to speak to French people without problems. Indeed, the main differences concern vocabulary, so that a French speaker would find only a few unknown words when chatting with a Swiss French speaker.|
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