French

French (/frenʧ/) is a romance language, which originated in France. A speaker of French is a francophone.

There are numerous French loanwords in English, and an additional large number of Latin-derived words which have cognates. French is also adopting many English loanwords, much to the chagrin of the Académie française. There are, however, many false friends between English and French, and also pseudo‑gallicisms in English.

Contrastive analysis also highlights differences in tense use. French uses an equivalent to the present perfect as a general past tense, even for finished time. So, for example, a French student may say something like *Yesterday, I have played football rather than Yesterday, I played football as that’s a direct translation of French Hier, j'ai joué au foot.

French L1 speakers often have difficulties with the consonant sounds Voiceless TH phoneme /θ/, Voiced TH phoneme /ð// and h phoneme /h/, which do not exist in French, and are typically substituted with s phoneme /s/, Z phoneme /z/, and h‑dropping. R phoneme /r/ is also often a problem and may be substituted with W phoneme /w/. French vowel sounds are also somewhat different, and lacking diphthongs, students often have problems with these.

French is the national language of France. There are also French-speaking regions in Belgium, Canada (particularly Quebec) and Switzerland.

In French, English is anglais. English as a foreign language is anglais comme une langue étrangère (ALE); English as a second language is anglais comme une langue seconde (ALS). (en) Teaching is (fr) enseignement, giving 'enseignement d’anglais comme une langue étrangère. (en) Learning is (fr) apprentisage, giving apprentisage d’anglais comme une langue étrangère.