African French
French is an administrative language and commonly used, though not on an official basis, in the Maghreb states, Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. As of 2006, an estimated 115 million African people spread across 31 African countries can speak French either as a first or second language, making Africa the continent with the most French speakers in the world. While there are many varieties of African French, common features include the use of an alveolar trill and use of borrowed words from local languages.
Read more about this topic: French Dialects
Famous quotes containing the words african and/or french:
“The soldier here, as everywhere in Canada, appeared to be put forward, and by his best foot. They were in the proportion of the soldiers to the laborers in an African ant-hill.... On every prominent ledge you could see England’s hands holding the Canadas, and I judged from the redness of her knuckles that she would soon have to let go.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)