La langue française coloniale
Lucille (Year 12) considers how the French language was brought to the African continent through colonialism.
With 321 million speakers, French is now the fifth most spoken language, and it’s thanks to Africa where 60% of speakers live!
In recent years, French has become the fifth most spoken language in the world, behind Chinese, English, Hindi and Spanish. According to the 2022 Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie report, there are now 321 million people on five continents who speak French, including 93 million pupils who have French as their language of schooling. The reason for this ranking is largely due to the 200 million Africans (⅔ in Sub-Saharan countries and ⅓ in North Africa) who speak it every day and contribute to making French a truly global language.
This popularity is the result of a long and difficult historical relationship between France and the African continent. The French language was introduced to the African continent in the 17th century when the first French ships taking part in the triangular trade, (set up by the Portuguese and the Spanish in the early 1600s), started arriving on the Western coast of Africa. Its influence grew rapidly from the middle of the 19th century when France officially launched colonialist wars in Senegal and Algeria, which later spread further in West and North Africa. For over a century, France maintained a substantial colonial empire in Africa, where, with the British, they occupied up to 95% of the continent. In exchange for military protection, African leaders guaranteed French companies access to strategic natural resources such as diamonds, ores, uranium, gas and oil.
Though France had lost its direct control on all its African colonies by the early 1960s, thanks to a decolonisation movement led by national elites educated in France, its influence on what is sometimes called ‘la Françafrique’ remained strong, and major French companies are present in lots of Sub-Saharan African countries where they continue to benefit from contracts allowing them to extract natural resources.
The creation of the International Organisation of la Francophonie in 1970 has contributed to keeping strong cultural and economic links between France and French-speaking countries all around the world. This is so especially in Africa, where French is still spoken in 29 countries, 11 of which have it as their only official language, and 10 more as their second official language. A study by the IOF found that 80 to 100% (depending on their nationality) of the French-speaking Africans wished to pass the language on to their children. The latest statistics show that French shows no sign of becoming less popular, as the majority of French speaking people in both North and Sub-Saharan Africa are now aged between 15 and 24. Even if French is a second language for most of them, at this rate, some estimates show that by 2050 Africa could account for 80% of the 700 million French speakers worldwide!