Talk:France

Bug: Spanish subtitles in Hymn

The hymn has spanish subtitles instead of french. Is that intentionally?

It's embedded within the file, probably because it was intended for the Spanish Wikipedia; so it can't be changed without uploading a new file. In future, please sign your comments with 4 tides like this: '~~~~' (without the quotes), and start new discussions at the bottom of the talk page. Regards, Rob (talk | contribs) 23:22, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Electronic music

there is also Laurent wolf that is a very popular electronic music producer

Languages

I am seriously disappointed by the fact that the language section only talks about French. Must I remind you that France is a linguistically diverse country.

List

Geographical distribution of regional languages and dialects. (Note that French is spoken all over the country, including both Metropolitan France and DOMs-TOMs (not shown on this map).)

The languages of Metropolitan France include:

• Indo-European languages
  • Romance languages:
    • Oïl language family:
      • Bourguignon-Morvandiau
      • Champenois or Campanois.
      • Franc-Comtois.
      • French.
      • Gallo.
      • Lorrain.
      • Norman.
      • Picard.
      • Poitevin and Saintongeais.
      • Walloon.
      • Angevin.
      • Manceau.
      • Mayennais.
      • Romande.
    • Occitan language (also Lenga d'òc, Langue d'oc):
      • Vivaroalpenc.
      • Auvergnat.
      • Gascon.
        • Béarnese (Béarnais).
        • Landese (Landais).
      • Languedocien.
      • Limousin.
      • Nissart (Niçois or Niçart).
      • Provençal.
    • Franco-Provençal also named Arpitan:
      • Bressan.
      • Dauphinois.
      • Forèzien.
      • Jurassien.
      • Lyonnais.
      • Savoyard.
    • Gallo Italic
      • Ligurian language.
    • Italian languages
      • Corsican (Corsu).
    • Catalan (Northern Catalan).
  • Germanic languages:
    • Alsatian (Elsässerdeutsch).
    • French Flemish: West Flemish dialect of Dutch.
    • Lorraine Franconian aka Lothringen.
  • Celtic language:
    • Breton aka Brita or Brezhoneg.
• Language isolate:
  • Basque aka Euskara.

There are also several languages spoken in France's overseas areas (see Administrative divisions of France for details)

• Amerindian languages in French Guiana,
• French-based creole languages in the French West Indies, French Guiana and Réunion (see:Antillean Creole, Haitian Creole, French Guiana Creole and Réunion Creole).
• Dutch and English in Saint Martin
• Many Austronesian languages:
  • in New Caledonia (see: New Caledonian languages, Loyalty Island languages).
  • 2 in Wallis & Futuna (see:Wallisian language, Futunan language).
  • in French Polynesia (Tahitian and other Eastern Polynesian languages).
• shiMaore and shiBushi in Mayotte.
• Kabyles spoken in New Caledonia.

French Sign Language is also recognised as a language of France.

There are immigrant languages spoken in some parts of France.

• African French - French is spoken both natively and as a second language by a large number of immigrants from Francophone countries in Africa
• Arabic (dialectal, mainly darija).
• Armenian (Western Armenian mostly, due to immigration from former French mandates in the Middle East, Lebanon and Syria; but there is an increasing minority of Eastern Armenian speakers due to recent immigrants arriving from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran).
• Bambara.
• Berber.
• Cambodian.
• Chinese.
• Danish.
• Dutch
  • Surinamese Dutch.
• English (Saint Martin), with significant minorities of British communities in Aquitaine (historic), Brittany, and in Nord-Pas-de-Calais (commuters working in UK but living in France), and from many countries dispersed in Paris and on Côte d'Azur (French Riviera); also the most widely taught foreign language in French schools, colleges and universities (before Spanish and German), but not widely used and understood after that, except in specific job positions (technical and tourism).
• Geg Albanian by refugees from Albania, Kosovo in former Yugoslavia and Republic of Macedonia.
• Standard German, also represented by regional dialects such as Low German.
• Greek.
• Haitian Creole.
• Hebrew
• Hindustani.
• Hungarian.
• Italian and Italian dialects (spoken by Italian immigrant communities in many major French cities, as well as French regions of former Italian state possession, such as Nice, Savoie, Haute-Savoie and Corsica).
• Japanese.
• Kabyles from Algeria.
• Korean.
• Lao.
• Lithuanian.
• Mandarin.
• Persian.
• Polish
• Portuguese from Portugal and Brazil.
• Romanian.
• Romany - spoken by the Roma people.
• Russian.
• Croatian - Brought over by workers and refugees from former Yugoslavia, the area made up of republics of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• Serbian.
• Spanish; the second foreign language taught in French schools, also a major language of Latin American immigrants in France.
• Tamil.
• Thai.
• Turkish.
• Ukrainian.
• Vietnamese.
• Welsh - Introduced by small late 19th century migration from Wales and minuscule community based in the mining basin of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
• Wolof, a West African language of the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, and Western Sahara.
• Yiddish.

Statistics

At the 1999 census, INSEE sampled 380,000 adult people all across Metropolitan France, and asked them questions about their family situation. One of the questions was about the languages that their parents spoke with them before the age of 5. This is the first time serious statistics were computed about the proportion of mother tongues in France. The results were published in Enquête familiale, Insee, 1999.

Here is a list of the nine most prominent mother tongues in France based on Enquête familiale.

Rank	Language	Mother tongue	Percentage of adult population
1	French	39,360,000	86% (note that this figure is an underestimate because people under 18 years of age were not surveyed; see note #2 below the table)
2	Germanic languages (Alsatian, Lorraine Franconian, etc.)	970,000 (of whom Alsatian: 660,000; standard German: 210,000; Lorraine Franconian: 100,000)	2.12% (of whom Alsatian: 1.44%; standard German: 0.46%; Lorraine Franconian: 0.22%)
3	Arabic (especially Maghrebi Arabic)	940,000	2.05%
4	Occitan language (Languedocian, Gascon, Provençal, etc.)	610,000 (another 1,060,000 had some exposure)	1.33% (another 2.32% had some exposure, see notes)
5	Portuguese	580,000	1.27%
6	Oïl languages (Picard, Gallo, Poitevin, Saintongeais, etc.)	570,000 (another 850,000 had some exposure)	1.25% (another 1.86% had some exposure, see notes)
7	Italian, Corsican and Ligurian (Niçard)	540,000	1.19%
8	Spanish	485,000	1.06%
9	Breton	280,000 (another 405,000 had some exposure)	0.61% (another 0.87% had some exposure, see notes)
10	About 400 other languages (Polish, Berber languages, East Asian languages, Catalan, Franco-Provençal, Corsican, Basque, West Flemish, etc.) as well as those who gave no response	2,350,000 (of whom English: 115,000)	5.12% (of whom English: 0.25% of total adult population)
	Total	45,762,000 (46,680,000 including those with two mother tongues who were counted twice)	102% (2% of people have both French and another language as their mother tongue, thus, they are counted twice)

If we add up people with mother tongue and people with some exposure to the language before the age of 5 (see note #3 below), then the five most important languages in metropolitan France are (note that the percentages add up to more than 100, because many people are now counted twice):

• French: 42,100,000 (92%)
• Occitan: 1,670,000 (3.65%)
• German and German dialects: 1,440,000 (3.15%)
• Oïl languages (excl. French): 1,420,000 (3.10%)
• Arabic: 1,170,000 (2.55%)

Notes on the table

1. The data in the table are about mother tongues, and not about actual language practice. It states that 14% of the adult people living in France in 1999 were born and raised up to the age of 5 in families that spoke only (or predominantly) some other languages than French. It does not mean that 14% of adult people in France spoke some other languages than French in 1999.
2. Only adults (i.e. 18 years and older) were surveyed. This means that French people born between 1981 and 1999 are not included in the survey. The mother tongue of the younger generations is more predominantly French than is the case with the older generations, because as the Enquête familiale survey explains, regional and immigrant language transmission decreases dramatically with each new generation, as French replaces the regional and immigrant languages. In the Enquête familiale survey, only 35% of parents whose mother tongue was a regional or immigrant language reported they spoke that language to their children. Thus, the 86% figure of people with French as their mother tongue is an underestimate because the younger generations whose predominant mother tongue is French are not counted.
3. The concept of "mother tongue" may not give a complete idea of the phenomenon of minority languages in France. This is because there are many people who were born and raised in families in which parents spoke to them only (or predominantly) French, but in which some regional or immigration languages were also occasionally used. One example: while the data tell us that 610,000 adults in 1999 had one of the Occitan dialects as their mother tongue, the survey also found out that another 1,060,000 adults were born and raised in families in which one of the Occitan dialects was occasionally spoken. Some of these 1,060,000 people may speak Occitan as fluently as the 610,000 people who have it as a mother tongue, while some other (the majority, probably) have only a limited knowledge of Occitan. We cannot infer from this that 1,670,000 adults are speakers of Occitan, but it may be the case that the total number of people with some form of exposure to Occitan is higher than the 610,000 figure, though some of this number may have abandoned the language since then.

Edit request 3.7.2013 Population should be corrected

Estimated total population of France is 66 200 000 (1st January 2012). It should be noted that currently cited INSEE number does not include Mayotte or COM (collectivités d’outre-mer).

Source: http://www.insee.fr/fr/ffc/ipweb/ip1385/ip1385.pdf

From page four: Le champ géographique du bilan démographique de 2011 reste la France métropolitaine et les DOM, mais sans Mayotte, dont la transformation en département d’outre-mer date du 31 mars 2011. En ajoutant les 803 000 habitants des collectivités d’outre-mer et de Mayotte, la population des territoires de la République française au 1 er janvier 2012 est estimée à 66,2 millions d’habitants.

"Reaching its height during the 19th and early 20th centuries"

'The intro states that "France has been a major power in Europe since the Late Middle Ages, reaching its height during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it possessed what was then the second-largest colonial empire, and one of the largest in history.

I guess this is true in terms of the amount of land under French control, but France was not as dominant a power on the European stage during this time as it was under Louis XIV or Napoleon, when it was clearly the most powerful state on the European continent. The 19th century (post-1815) was a period of French demographic and military decline vis-à-vis Germany. 108.254.160.23 (talk) 03:08, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

 Done I settled the issue by separating the sentence in two. Blaue Max (talk) 16:07, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Constitutional republic?

There is no such thing. Another term coined by American Republicans. It does not make sense. B.Lameira (talk) 19:01, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Of course there is. A republic governed by a constitution. Not all republics have a constitution. 151.213.165.177 (talk) 13:37, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Area

The summary section of the France article states total area is 640,679 km2. The body states: The European territory of France covers 547,030 square kilometres ... France's total land area, with its overseas departments and territories (excluding Adélie Land), is 674,843 km2. So, how is the number 640,679 determined? KathonWiki (talk) 17:44, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Excludes overseas territories and collectivities. Many editors are unwilling to accept that these are part of France. Should be corrected to figure in body (674,843 km2). Regards, Rob (talk | contribs) 17:58, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Will the article be Condensed/Split?

As the title says, will this article be consensed/split make it more accessible? That template has been there for nearly a year now. 151.213.165.177 (talk) 13:33, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Inconsistency

Other articles about EU states include the total water area as a percentage on the right. While the area is effectively 0%, indicated here https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/fr.html , it should be included nonetheless. 94.175.75.132 (talk) 16:33, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Amazon.Com is not a Reliable Source and not a Publisher

Please use Template:cite book. If you need to pull the information from online, the easiest way to do it without using a spamlink is to find the work on Google books and use this utility to convert it to an acceptable reference: http://reftag.appspot.com Jay Dubya (talk) 19:23, 1 April 2014 (UTC)