Indian French is a dialect of French spoken by Indians in past colonies of Pondicherry, Chandernagore, Karikal, Mahé and Yanam. In this dialect, there is a considerable influence from Dravidian languages like Tamil (Pondicherry Tamil dialect), Telugu (Yanam Telugu dialect) and Malayalam (Mahe Malayalam dialect).
There are several varieties of Indian French, corresponding to the former French colonies, as follows:
- Tamil people (nearly 60,000 in France, 10,000 people in Pondicherry)
- Telugu people (nearly 10,000 in France, 60 people in Yanam)
- Malayali people (4000-5000 in France)
Read more about Indian French: Examples of Indian French
Famous quotes containing the words indian and/or french:
“In the woods of Powhatan,
Still ‘tis told by Indian fires
How a daughter of their sires
Saved a captive Englishman.”
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863)
“Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)