French is the mother tongue of over 100 million people and the second language (estimates vary) of 150 to 300 million people. Spoken around the world on all five continents French is a truly international language.
It is an official language in 29 countries and one of the official languages of the African Union, the European Union, the Council of Europe, FIFA, the International Court of Justice, the International Olympic Committee, Interpol, NATO, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the United Nations and its agencies (where it is also one of the two working languages along with English), the International Red Cross, and the World Trade Organisation. It is the official language of the International Postal Union.
La Francophonie, an international organisation of countries which are French speaking or include a prevalence of French speakers and French culture, has 55 member states.
Learn French and you learn the language of
Voltaire, Montesquieu, François Rabelais, Jean de La Fontaine, Molière, Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean Racine,
Marquis de Sade, François-René de Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac,
Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau,
André Malraux, Albert Camus, René Descartes, Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Blaise Pascal, Antoine Lavoisier, Louis Pasteur,
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Nicolas Poussin, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Maurice Ravel, Édith Piaf, Johnny Hallyday, Yves Montand, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Luc Godard,
François Truffaut, Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve,
Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Adjani, Emmanuelle Béart, Juliette Binoche, Audrey Tautou ...
to name but a few. |
