French Morphology: The French Language Family

1883 Words4 Pages

The chosen language for this paper is French. Morphology 1. Information on the language family it belongs to Language families are groups of languages that are related to each other because they come from a common older language. French comes from the Indo-European languages family and is a part of the Romance family along with Italian and Spanish which was spoken a long time ago. 2. Geographic location of the speakers, number of speakers, dialects, etc. French is the first spoken language is various countries such as France, Switzerland, Monaco. It’s also used is parts of Belgium(Brussels), and Canada (Quebec) according to .. French speakers are distributed among all five continents which are Europe, Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Oceania Including 72 million so-called partial French speakers. Europe accounts for 39.87% of the French-speaking population, sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean for 36.03%, North Africa and the Middle East for 15.28%, America and the Caribbean for 7.66% and Asia/Oceania for 1.16% (OIF, La langue françaisedans le monde, 2010) Africa makes-up the majority of French speakers of both First or Second language. An Estimated number of 115 million speakers are spread across 31 African countries. According to the there are 274 million people worldwide who are speak French and the number is largely rising because 54.7% of those who speak French live in high-fertility African countries. 3- A description of the sounds in the language and it’s In the onset, the central approximants [w], [ɥ], and [j] each correspond to a high vowel, /u/, /y/, and /i/ respectively. There are a few minimal pairs where the approximant and corresponding vowel contrast, but there are also many cases where they are in free variation. Contrasts between /j/ and /i/ occur in final position as in /pɛj/ paye, "pay", vs. /pɛi/ pays, "country". French pronunciation follows strict rules based on spelling, but French spelling is often based more on history than phonology. The rules for pronunciation vary between dialects, but the standard rules are: Final single consonants, in particular s, x, z, t, d, n, p and g are normally silent. The final letters f, k, q, and l, however, are normally pronounced. The final c is sometimes pronounced like in bac, sac, roc but can also be silent like in blanc or estomac. The final r is usually silent when it follows an e in a word of two or more syllables, but it is pronounced in some words (hiver, super, cancer etc.).

More about French Morphology: The French Language Family

Open Document