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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 82.141.67.203 (talk) at 20:40, 15 February 2013 (→‎Consistency within Wikipedia: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Hello vandals

Do you even realize that the original pages can be seen in "view history"? We can just bypass your childish declarations and look at the original information. People like me will always undo what you've done. Face it, your trolling will never succeed. 137.163.145.226 (talk) 12:24, 7 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Title

Shouldn't the title of this page be "List of countries where French is an official language"? JackofOz 10:35, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

french guiana should be shaded in blue

Done. Bamse 00:15, 4 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And so should New Caledonia, Kerguelen, and Réunion. Aaker (talk) 18:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Lebanon

Why Lebanon is not in the list? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.82.226.40 (talk) 22:04, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply] 

Lebanon doesn't have French as an official language. Robin Hood 1212 (talk)  —Preceding comment was added at 15:07, 12 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Canada/Québec

I understand that Québec is not an independent country, and it is right that Canada should appear on this list. But then the population figure in the table should also be that of Canada, not that of Québec as is the case right now. I know this may be confusing but there is a very clear disclaimer on top of the table. I am changing that value. Philippe Magnabosco (talk) 12:39, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the population figures should indicate only the number of French speakers. This is especially true for Canada, Belgium & Switzerland where French is co-official with other languages. The problem that the sum will be taken as the number of French speakers in the World and that's completely false. If there is no objections I am going to change the figures to reflect numbers of French speakers out of the total population. Bestofmed (talk) 21:02, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For most of the countries on the list you probably won't be able to get that data - it's probably better to list "pop" and "num speakers" seperately, since for most of the African countries, you'll never get the number of speakers. WilyD 21:51, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Québec is now included under the Dependent Entities section. Shaun Vancouver (talk) 14:57, 2 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Canada is an officially bilingual countries in which French is one of the official languages. I am not sure why Canada is missing from the list altogether. I am adding Canada in as one of the countries along with the statistics. Shaun Vancouver (talk) 02:36, 2 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Quebec should not be on the dependent entities list - that's a list for places where the larger country does not have French as an official language, but some smaller part of them does. French is an official language of the federal government in Canada, so Quebec does not belong on the dependent entities list. I have removed it. AshleyMorton (talk) 00:32, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My interpretation of the dependent entities list is where any sub-national administrative region of a country proper (besides overseas territories) has French as one of its official languages (such as Pondicherry and Aosta Valley). Québec should be on the dependent entities list given that its status is similar to Pondicherry and Aosta Valley; French is the sole official language of Québec. To be consistent, if Québec is not on the list, then neither should Pondicherry or Aoasta Valley which are sub-national units that are not overseas territories. Shaun Vancouver (talk) 02:31, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, see, India does not consider French an official language at the national level. Therefore, if we didn't have Pondicherry, then there wouldn't be any mention of it at all. Quebec is already included because Canada is there. If you're going to include Quebec, then you need to include every city in Quebec, as well, also the province of New Brunswick, as well as the cities of Sudbury, Timmins, Ottawa, Cornwall, Saint-Boniface, almost every city in New Brunswick, and probably a couple of hundred more. With the Aosta Valley, French is NOT a language of Italy, so it's not included. On the other hand, we do not list all the departments of France, all of the cantons of Switzerland, all the cities and towns of Mali... etc. You see? We don't list subnational entities for things that are already on the list as full countries. Until you add every department of France, you shouldn't have Quebec there. AshleyMorton (talk) 03:21, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
In fact, the odd ones are the French overseas territories. The argument is that the "France" above is only Metropolitan France, and that the others are separate enough that they're not covered, but it seems a bit silly to me. I mean, the flag used as a symbol looks mighty similar to me! AshleyMorton (talk) 03:25, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That clarifies matters better, though the title of the section should be more clear. The title should be "Dependent Entities with French as an Official Language" and the column that says "country" in the Dependent Entities section should be changed to Entity" 69.196.186.105 (talk) 03:45, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Number of countries where French is official

I noticed that the first paragraph says that there are 31 countries where French is official, but there are only 29 countries in the first list. Are there 2 countries missing? Also, is the 2nd section supposed to be dependant entities where French is official? The reason that I ask this is that French is not official in Louisiana, as it doesn't have an official language. Kman543210 (talk) 12:43, 13 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

29 is the correct figure. French is de jure official in 29 countries but de facto official / commonly used in 7 more countries. In total: 36. Aaker (talk) 14:44, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note that in Nigeria, French was co-official and de-jure with English (and other regional languages: Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Edo?), this was removed recently (I don't know when), even though there's still use for it in this country where it is also taught in many places. The main reason may be a simplification and reduction of administration costs (no more need to translate all legal acts or to require knowledge of French in addition of English, when there's already difficulties to support the various regional languages that are much more widely known and used than even English, which is still far from being a lingua franca there).
Education is the problem. Even teaching Englihs is not so much a success, and the regional languages still have very strong resistance, notably between Hausa and Yoruba (they prefer English) and Igbo (they still prefer French). I don't know what is the situation with Edo speakers. verdy_p (talk) 23:01, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Guernsey & Jersey

Hang on a minute, I have never heard anyone from Guernsey speak French and I should now I have lived there for my whole life and the same for Jersey I've been there loads and only heard French very occasionally spoken.86.141.76.248 (talk) 18:48, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For Guernsey, French is official there. But for Jersey, the more dominant variant, named "Jersiais", is a local variant of Normand, that ISO 639 still considers as being part of French (Norman is still not encoded in ISO 639 and there's doubt it will be encoded soon even if it is much nearer to Jersiais than to French, but this may change since Jersiais has now an official education program, and an officially supported dictionnary).
On the opposite, the Picard language (called Ch'timi in the French department of Nord) is encoded as a separate language, despite it is nearer from French, and easier to understand by French-only speakers, when compared to Norman/Jersiais). But almost all Picard speakers are bilingual and speak standard French fluently enough to be understood in all regions and even abroad in other French speaking countries (this is not the case with Jersiais speakers in Jersey that are almost all bilingual with English, but not always French, despite France is much nearer than Britain)
Note that there are very frequent loads of tourists coming from France to Jersey, more than those coming from Britain, and many French natives working there (with Britain natives) throughout the year and not just for summer months, much more than in the Islands of Guernsey; however all these French workers in Jersey are at least bilingual in English, but don't know Jersiais at all. But French is known in Jersais and demanded to workers, notably those working for tourists and retail commerce or restaurants. If you speak English, of course they will speak to you in English (so you may not have noticed when they could speak French). Note that even the British Queen speaks French very fluently, without even any English accent (along with German, because of the origin of her family), and so does the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who passed all his holidays in France where he has a residence (just like many British citizens). It's not difficult at all to find people speaking French in UK, especially in England (it's more dificult in Scotland, Wales or Ireland). verdy_p (talk) 23:16, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New Discussion

A discussion has been started at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries/Lists of countries which could affect the inclusion criteria and title of this and other lists of countries. Editors are invited to participate. Pfainuk talk 11:16, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 03:05, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of countries where French is an official language → List of French-speaking countries – Article also lists countries where French is spoken but is not an official language. Facts707 (talk) 07:17, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. French speaking countries is now a redirect. The suggestion doesn't work since any country can have a small number of French speakers. Just like the US has French speakers, Spanish, Chinese, Farsi speakers, etc. That doesn't mean the US should be listed in every language, should it? Mistakefinder (talk) 08:27, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose there are countries with substantial French speaking populations which does not have French as an official language, and is not commonly used outside of some francophone region or the francophone population, so the definition of French speaking country is fluid. 65.94.77.11 (talk) 11:20, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment it should probably be split in two, one with official recognition, one that has other countries. 65.94.77.11 (talk) 07:19, 7 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Questionable Data Source for French Speakers

If you take a look at the source document for the number of speakers in countries where French is not official, it's sketchy. Enormous numbers in Bulgaria, Romania... Algeria omitted for no apparent reason, ditto the United States. I don't have a better source to propose here, but I used the Wikipedia page as a starter for a research project I'm involved with, and that OIF document is pretty much a non-starter for me, even given the difficulties inherent in language/demographics research. Ethnologue, dated though their numbers are, strikes me as better grounded. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.232.13.155 (talk) 17:52, 1 June 2012 (UTC) Okay: update by original poster... Algeria and US excluded b/c not dues-paying members of La Franophonie. Data still extremely questionable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.232.13.155 (talk) 18:03, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Consistency within Wikipedia

French language has 75 million speakers as of 2007.
However, this "list" has over 120 million speakers in the official section, and over 32 million in the other section. That results about 153 million speakers total, over twice the number in the language article. Oh yes, this is from 2005, maybe 78 million stopped using French as a first language? 82.141.67.203 (talk) 20:40, 15 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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