French phrasebook

Sourced from Wikivoyage. Text is available under the CC-by-SA 3.0 license.
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French (français) is a Romance language, and one of the most widely spoken languages in the world: 220 million people speak French, including 115 million native speakers. The French language originated in France, but in the modern day it is spoken on every continent; it is an official language of 29 different countries, an important business, cultural, or minority language in dozens of other countries and regions, and is used officially by scores of international organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Olympic Committee. Although it's been largely supplanted by English these days, French was the main international lingua franca well into the 20th century, and at one point, French was the language spoken in most of the royal courts of Europe. To this day, it remains de rigueur for educated people in many societies around the world to have some level of basic French ability.
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French is the sole official language of France, including all of its overseas departments and territories, and is the only language you will need to communicate with French nationals. Beyond France, French is widely spoken in many nearby countries in Europe, including the southern half of Belgium (Wallonia and Brussels), western Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg, and the Aosta Valley of northwestern Italy. A significant number of second-language speakers are also found on most of the Channel Islands (Jersey, Guernsey, and Sark, where dialects of Norman extremely similar to French persist), and the tiny Pyrenean country of Andorra.
In the Americas, French is spoken primarily in the Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, the northern and eastern parts of Ontario and around the Winnipeg area of Manitoba. Although Canada is an officially bilingual nation and there are Francophone enclaves in almost every province, outside these four provinces, it's quite rare to encounter anyone in Canada who speaks more than a few words of French without hunting down those off-the-beaten-track French-speaking communities. French is also spoken in a few parts of the United States, namely parts of Louisiana and northern Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. In the Caribbean, French is an official language of Haiti, a former colonial possession of France. The Americas also host the French departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Mayotte, plus the overseas collectivities of Saint Barthélemy, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and the northern half of Saint Martin.
Elsewhere, French is an official language of many former French and Belgian colonies in Africa, like Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of the Congo, and is unofficial but carries prestige in others, like Algeria and Morocco. It is an important administrative, educational, and cultural language in the former French Southeast Asian possessions of Vietnam, Laos and, to a lesser degree, Cambodia. In Oceania, New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna remain overseas territories of France today, and French is also one of the official languages of Vanuatu. In the Indian Ocean, Réunion is a French overseas department, while French is also an official language in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
The French Wikivoyage has a page that can help you locate French-speaking regions.

Grammar

Pronunciation

International varieties of French

Phrase list