French people

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The French (French: les Français), or the French people, are an ethnic group originally of mixed Celtic, Germanic and Italic origins which make up the majority of the inhabitants of France in Western Europe. As with any other nationality, people with French citizenship include numerous other indigenous and migrant ethnicities as well as French. There are sizeable communities of ethnic French both in overseas departments and territories and in former French colonies in Africa.

Although most French people speak the French language as their native tongue, there are large numbers of people of French ancestry outside of Europe who speak other first languages, particularly English throughout most of North America, Spanish in southern South America and Afrikaans in South Africa.


French
Total population: c. 90 to 100 million
Significant populations in: France:
   54,000,000

United States:
   16,000,000
Canada:
   8,000,000
Belgium:
   3,200,000
South America:
   4,000,000
Switzerland:
   1,300,000
Africa:
   1,000,000
Luxembourg:
   400,000
Channel Islands:
   100,000

Language: French,

Basque, Breton, Corsican

Religion: Christianity ; Jews ; Muslims ; None
Related ethnic groups: {{{related}}}

Contents

History

Main article: History of France

The French are a Western European people whose origins, for the most part, trace back to the mingling of the Celts, the Romans, and some Germanic peoples. In the pre-Roman era, all of Gaul (an area of Western Europe that encompassed all of what is known today as France, Belgium, part of Germany and Northern Italy) was inhabited by a variety peoples who were known collectively as the Gaulish tribes. Their lands were conquered in 58-51 BC by the Roman legions under the command of General Julius Caesar. The area then became part of the Roman Empire. Over the next five centuries the two cultures and peoples intermingled, creating a hybridized Gallo-Roman culture. The old Celtic tongues had been largely reduced to a mere influence over the various Vulgar Latin dialects that had come to dominate communications in the region, dialects that would later develop into the French language. Today, the last redoubt of Celtic culture and language in France can be found in the northwestern region of Brittany, although this is not the result of a survival of Gaulish language but of medieval migration from Cornwall.

With the decline of the Roman Empire in Western Europe a third people entered the picture: the Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that began filtering across the Rhine River from present-day Germany in the third century. By the early sixth century the Franks, led by the Merovingian king Clovis I and his sons, had consolidated their hold on much of modern-day France, the country to which they gave their name. The other major Germanic people to arrive in France were the Normans, Viking raiders from modern Denmark and Norway, who occupied the northern region known today as Normandy in the 9th century. The Vikings eventually intermarried with the local people, converting to Christianity in the process. It was the Normans who, two centuries later, would go on to conquer England. Eventually, though, the independent Norman duchy was incorporated back into the French kingdom in the Middle Ages.

In the roughly 900 years after the Norman invasions France had a fairly settled population. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, France experienced relatively low levels of emigration to the Americas, with the exception of the Huguenots. However, significant emigration of mainly Roman Catholic French populations led to the settlement of the provinces of Quebec and Louisiana, both (at the time) French possessions, as well as colonies in the West Indies, Mascarene islands and Africa. France's population dynamics began to change in the middle of the 19th century, as France joined the Industrial Revolution. The pace of industrial growth pulled in millions of European immigrants over the next century, with especially large numbers arriving from Poland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. These immigrants intermarried and assimilated over time, and their descendants are almost universally considered Français de souche (ethnic French), or at least as uncomplicatedly 'French'.

This was not the case with the other big group of recent immigrants, the non-European peoples whose migration waxed as the intra-European migration waned in the 1960's. Since then, France has become home to millions of non-European peoples, principally from the former French colonies of the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa. The arrival of many Muslim migrants from North and West Africa has meant that Islam has become the second largest religion in France, with around 5 million or so adherents of varying levels of belief. It is estimated that around 50,000 Français de souche (ethnic French) have converted to Islam.

In Europe, there are several sizeable permanent French populations outside of France. The largest is in Belgium, in the region of Wallonia and the city of Brussels. In Switzerland, the main concentration of the ethnic French population is in the Western region known as Romandy. Smaller French communities can be found in Luxembourg and the Channel Islands, although most Channel Islanders speak English as their first language today.

Diaspora

There is a sizeable French diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. The Canadian province of Quebec is the center of French life on the Western side of the Atlantic. It is home to the oldest French diaspora community and to vibrant French-language arts, media, and learning. There are sizeable French-Canadian communities scattered throughout the other provinces of Canada, particularly in Ontario and New Brunswick.

The United States is home to millions of people of French descent, particularly in Louisiana and New England. The French community in Louisiana consists of the Creoles, the descendants of the French settlers who arrived when Louisiana was a French colony, and the Cajuns, the descendants of Acadian refugees from the Great Upheaval. In New England, the vast majority of ethnic French immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries came not from France, but from over the border in Quebec. These French Canadians arrived to work in the timber mills and textile plants that were spring up throughout the region as it industrialized. Today, nearly 25% of the population of New Hampshire is of French ancestry, the highest of any state.

It is worth noting that the English and Dutch colonies of pre-Revolutionary America attracted large numbers of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France. In the Dutch colony that later became New York and northeastern New Jersey, these French Huguenots, nearly identical in religion to the Dutch Reformed Church, assimilated almost completely into the Dutch community. However large it may have been at one time, it has lost all identity of its French origin, often with the translation of names (examples: de la Montagne > Vandenberg by translation; de Vaux > DeVos or Devoe by phonetic respelling). Huguenots appeared in all of the English colonies and likewise assimilated. Even though this mass settlement approached the size of the settlement of the French settlement of Quebec, it has become heavily diluted and has left little trace of any cultural influence. New Rochelle, New York is named after La Rochelle, France, one of the sources of Huguenot emigration to the Dutch colony; and New Paltz, New York, is one of the few non-urban settlements of Huguenots that did not undergo massive recycling of buildings in the usual redevelopment of such older, larger cities as New York City or New Rochelle.

Elsewhere in the Americas, the majority of the French diaspora in South America can found in Argentina, Brazil and Chile (families Pinochet, Goulart, Hiriart, Chamot, Béthencourt, Béthancourt, Bétencourt, Bétancourt, Lanusse and more) and there is a sizeable population of French people (whether natives of Metropolitan France or descendants of such) in the French Caribbean.

Language

Main article: French language

The French language, the mother tongue of the majority of the world's French, is a Romance language, one of the many derived from Latin. In addition to its Latinate base, the development of French was also influenced, in both grammar and vocabulary, by the Celtic tongues of pre-Roman Gaul, the Germanic tongues of the Franks and the Norsemen/Vikings who settled in Normandy. More recently, French has been heavily influenced by other global tongues, particularly English.

French is not the only language spoken by the population in France. Other regional languages include:

See also

External links

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