Are There More French Speakers in Africa Than in Europe?

Hello language lovers,

Still on the topic of language, today I'll be narrowing it down to;WHETHER THERE ARE MORE FRENCH SPEAKING PEOPLE IN AFRICA THAN THE WHOLE OF EUROPE?

Africa is contributing 47.7 percent (143.1 million) to the French-speaking population thereby making French a global language. This is more than 45.7 percent (137.1 million) of the whole of Europe and France with a population of 67.12 million.
According to a recent report by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), French has become the world’s fifth most spoken language as 300 million people in five continents speak the French language. Moving a step up from its previous sixth position, the French language which is ranked behind Chinese, English, Spanish and Arabic has so many speakers thanks to the millions of Africans who speak the language daily.
In the last four years, the number of people speaking French has increased by almost 9.6 percent . The report which noted that the centre of gravity of the Francophonie is moving south added that between 2010 and 2018, 22.7 million more people speak French. 68 percent of these additional French speakers live in sub-Saharan Africa, 22 percent live in North Africa, 7 percent reside in America while Europe houses just 3 percent of the 22.7 million new speakers.
In total, out of the 300 million Francophonies, 34.8 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa, 12.9 percent live in the Middle East and North Africa, 43.9 percent live in Western Europe, 1.8 percent live in the Central and Eastern part of Europe. North America, Latin America and the Carribean is home to 6 percent while 0.6 percent people live in Asia and Oceania.

The French language is gaining momentum globally because it is taught as a foreign language in schools around the world. Currently French is the second most widely learned foreign language in the world, with 132 million students and over 500,000 teachers. French is also the main language of instruction in schools in Benin, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo.

French is also taught at establishments run by France’s cultural network abroad (Instituts Français and Alliance Française schools). There are over 481 cultural network establishments of the French school network’s abroad providing French education according to France’s national curriculum.
The growing African population is a huge contributor to French language ranking 5th on the chart. Till date, French remains the sole official language in 11 African countries and the second official language in 10. The OIF estimates that the number of French speakers will rise to over 700 million by 2050, 80 percent of whom will be in Africa.

French is also one of the working languages of many international institutions; the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the African Union (AU), the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) thereby increasing the number of speakers.

Comment below whether you agree that there are more French speakers in Africa than in Europe.

To your learning
of language,

FrenchLadyDisi
Your Language Tutor.

The Psychology of Language learning

Hi language lovers,

I'll be dealing on the psychology of learning a language because as we all know and agree there is a psychology to everything in life, even if not all, at least most things in life.

What does it take to learn a foreign language? At first glance, it might seem straight forward: with hard work, consistent study, and lots of time, you’ll eventually master the complexities of another tongue. However, in terms of psychology, it’s not so simple. There are many psychological factors such as your reasons for learning the language, as well as the methods you use to learn new words that can drastically affect the languages learning process. Additionally, learning a language confers several practical and cognitive benefits that you might not expect.

Here, we’ll take a look at the underlying psychology of language learning by examining the 3 Ms of foreign languages: Motivation, Memory, and the Mind.

Why falling in love is the best way to learn. It’s no secret that you need to be motivated to learn a language: without motivation, you’ll never find the drive to go to class or pick up your course book. But motivation comes in many different forms. For example, if you’re studying Japanese, you may be motivated to learn the language because you love anime and want to experience it in its original language. Alternatively, you may be motivated because your job is offering a big raise to employees who can communicate with Japanese clients in their mother tongue.

There are two types of language motivation:
i) Intrinsic language motivation comes from within (inside); it’s borne out of personal interest (such as loving anime). As it turns out, intrinsic motivation is the much more powerful of the two: when we’re genuinely interested in learning a language for the sake of learning it, we learn faster and more efficiently. Intrinsic motivation; maximising your ability to remember If we could flawlessly memorise everything we see after looking at it only once, learning a foreign language would be a much faster and easier process.

ii) Extrinsic language motivation comes from outide; it’s a response to our desire to achieve some sort of unrelated goal (such as getting a raise at work). This distinction also explains why language classes often produce lacklustre results. If students are forced to learn a language that doesn’t interest them solely for the sake of passing a test, they are operating entirely on extrinsic motivation, and are unlikely to retain any real language skills.

Unfortunately, we still haven’t figured out how to make our memories perfect. But there are some measures we can take to optimise our ability to remember words and phrases, and speed up the language learning process as much as possible.

Probably the best known memory strategy in the language learning world is spaced repetition, which has become something of a buzzword among foreign language learners. Spaced repetition refers to the presentation of vocabulary items throughout long-term intervals. This has been proven to help us remember vocabulary much more robustly than cramming words into a short period of time.

Without complex computer generated algorithms, it’s not easy to take advantage of spaced repetition by yourself. But luckily, digital flashcards like Anki and online language courses like LinguaLift utilise spaced repetition, and thus constitute great tools for the everyday language learner.

Another simple and actionable way to improve our retention of words is to take advantage of what is known as context-dependent learning. When we remember a given piece of information, our brains also store a lot of extraneous information such as our environment and surroundings when the memory was formed.

Have you ever had the experience where you remember a certain word or phrase because you can visualise where it was located on the page of your course book? This is because of context-dependent learning: your brain stored irrelevant information (the word’s location on the page), and recalling that information helped you remember the word.
Keep your language-learning context as consistent as possible to maximise the rate at which you retrieve and consolidate memories.

The take-home point here is that you should keep your language learning context as consistent as possible to maximise the rate at which you retrieve and consolidate memories. For instance, if you’re studying Spanish vocabulary, do so (to the extent that you can) in the same place, at the same time of day, and with the same materials.

What is the point you are going to try out in your language learning process, Leave a comment below.

To your learning
of Languages,

FrenchLadyDisi
Your Language Tutor.

Philosophy of Language Learning

Hi guys,

Today I'll be treating on questions concerning the philosophy of learning languages.

Concerns such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. Substantially different systems of communication that may impede but do not prevent mutual comprehension are called dialects of a language. In order to describe in detail the actual different language patterns of individuals, the term idiolect , meaning the habits of expression of a single person, has been coined.

Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects . Human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on social convention and learning.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family .

The Indo-European family is the most widely spoken and includes languages as diverse as English , Russian and

Hindi ; the Sino-Tibetan family includes Mandarin, Bodo and the other Chinese languages, and Tibetan ; the Afro-Asiatic family includes Arabic , Somali , and Hebrew ; the Bantu languages include Swahili , and Zulu , and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa ; and the Malayo-Polynesian languages include Indonesian, Malay , Tagalog , and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout the Pacific.

The languages of the Dravidian family spoken mostly in Southern India, include Tamil Telugu and Kannada . Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 2no1st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.

Leave a comment below about your own philosophy of language learning.

To your learning
of languages,

FrenchLadyDisi
Your Language Tutor. 

CONTINUATION When You Hear The Word LANGUAGE?

Hi language learners,

Today I will be giving the definition of Language for better understanding. Actually, definitions of language have been proposed but we shall be looking at a few of them;

Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and language scholar, stated: “Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.”

The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the following definition: “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.”

A language is a system of communication which consists of a set of sounds and written symbols which are used by the people of a particular country or region for talking or writing.

Language is the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way. Also, language is a system of communication used by a particular country or community.

According to Wikipedia: Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics. And we all know a person studying language is a linguist.

That will be all for now, next time I'll be talking on questions concerning the philosophy of language.

Comment below what you think about this blog post.

To your learning
of languages,

FrenchLadyDisi
Your Language Tutor. 

When You Hear The Word Language

Hi language enthusiast,

I have always been fascinated by divers kind of languages both globally and locally, how there are structured, similar and different in their own unique way.

What flashes through your mind?
What imagery do you have?
What is your first thought?
What are you thinking?

• Is it sounds,
• Is it speech,
• Is it words,
• Is it feedback
• Is it linguistics 

        OR
Communication.
Do you think in terms of
Relation or association,
Understanding and responding,
Flowing and blending,
Community and society.
Please ponder on it,
Sleep on it for a while.....
Bye for now, thanks.

To your learning
of languages,

FrenchLadyDisi
Your Language Tutor.