The French Language
French language is one of the official languages of the United Nations. It is spoken by more than 100 million people world wide. It belongs to the romance sub class of the Indo European language family. It is one of the most sweet, polite and musical language of the world. It is primarily spoken in France but sizeable speakers are present in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and Canada. In Canada it is the second official language along with English.
The French language has a unique pronunciation system which makes certain alphabets silent in such a way as to produce musical sounds when speaking. To give you an example the last consonant of any French word is only pronounced if it is followed by a vowel otherwise it is kept silent. The second thing is that J is pronounced as Y in French and i as ee. Moreover the CH is always pronounced as SH in French. So the name Jacques Chirac is pronounced Yak Sheerac. For similar reasons the world famous city Paris is pronounced as Paghee- the sound of r is quite different in French and not easily pronounced by English speakers.
Apart from the beauty and the music, learning of French is beneficial to enhance one’s vocabulary of English for many English words and expressions are derived from French. Art déco, attaché, bête noire, blonde, brunette, carte blanche, coup d’état, critique, cuisine, déjà vu, du jour, en bloc, en masse, en route, fiancé, force majeure, genre, hors de combat, joie de vivre, laissez-faire, matinee, nouveau riche, objet d’art, par excellence, queue, rendez-vous, sans, souvenir, toilette, vis-à-vis etc are just a few words out of a long and almost unending list of words which the English language has borrowed from French.
It follows from above that learning French is not only a delightful activity but also an activity which enriches one’s vocabulary.
Waqar Awan is a platinum level writer. His hobbies include reading books and writing articles about Climate and Weather, History, Geography, Religion, Self Help, Self improvement, Vocabulary skills and other topics of general interest. Waqar Awan has more than 10 years of writing articles and many of his articles have also been published in various journals internationally. If you have any comments about his articles you can anytime contact him at waqar5670@gmail.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Waqar_Awan
Related posts
Tags: english, france, french, french language, language, learn, learning, learning french, the french language