French Africa Voice Over Agency

African French (French: français africain) is the generic name of the varieties of French spoken by an estimated 120 million (2010) people in Africa spread across 24 francophone countries.[2] This includes those who speak French as a first or second language in these 31 francophone African countries (dark blue on the map), but it does not include French speakers living in non-francophone African countries. Africa is thus the continent with the most French speakers in the world. French arrived in Africa as a colonial language. These African French speakers are now an important part of the Francophonie.

In Africa, French is often spoken alongside indigenous languages, but in some areas it has become a first language, such as in the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast or Libreville, Gabon. In some countries it is a first language among some classes of the population, such as in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria where French is a first language among the upper classes (many people in the upper classes are simultaneous bilinguals in Arabic/French), but only a second language among the general population. In each of the francophone African countries French is spoken with local specificities in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary.

There are many different varieties of African French, but they can be broadly grouped into three categories:

– the French spoken by people in West and Central – spoken altogether by about 75 million people as either a first or second language.
– the French variety spoken by Maghrebis and Berbers in Northwest Africa (see Maghreb French), which has about 36 million first and second language speakers.
– the French variety spoken in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.
– the French variety spoken by Creoles in the Indian Ocean (Réunion, Mauritius, and Seychelles), which has around 1.6 million first and second language speakers. The French spoken in this region is not to be confused with the French-based creole languages, which are also spoken in the area.

All the African French varieties differ from standard French both in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary, but the formal African French used in education, media, and legal documents is based on standard French vocabulary.

In the colonial period, a vernacular form of creole French known as Petit nègre was also present in West Africa. The term has since, however, become a pejorative term for poorly spoken African French. V.Y. Mudimbe describes African French as possessing “approximate pronunciation, repressed syntax, bloated or tortured vocabulary, intonation, rhythm and accent stuck in the original African language flow; many phonetic, morphologic and lexical africanisms.”The differences from European French are due to influence from the mother tongues and the complexity of French grammatical rules, which inhibit its learning by most non-native speakers.

The difficulty linguists have in describing African French comes from variations, such as the “pure” language used by many African intellectuals and writers versus the mixtures between French and African languages. For this, the term “creolization” is used, often in a pejorative way, and especially in the areas where French is on the same level with one or more local languages. According to G. Manessy, “The consequences of this concurrency may vary according to the social status of the speakers, to their occupations, to their degree of acculturation and thus to the level of their French knowledge.”

Code-switching, or the alternation of languages within a single conversation, takes place in both Senegal and in Democratic Republic of the Congo, the latter having four “national” languages – Kikongo, Lingala, Ciluba, and Swahili – which are in a permanent opposition to French. Code-switching has been studied since colonial times by different institutions of linguistics. One of these, located in Dakar, Senegal, already spoke of the creolization[inconsistent] of French in 1968, naming the result “franlof”: a mix of French and Wolof (the language most spoken in Senegal) which spreads by its use in urban areas and through schools, where teachers often speak Wolof in the classroom despite official instructions.

The omnipresence of local languages in francophone African countries – along with insufficiencies in education – has given birth to a new linguistic concept: le petit français. Le petit français is the result of a superposition of the structure of a local language with a narrowed lexical knowledge of French. The specific structures, though very different, are juxtaposed, marking the beginning of the creolization process.