The French language has gone into decline in Europe over the last 4 years, according to a study published this week by the IOF. But large gains in Sub-Saharan Africa have driven a 7% increase in the world’s francophone population.

According to the study The French Language in the World, published by the International Organisation for la Francophonie (IOF), the number of Francophones in the world has increased by 7% since 2010, and now stands at 274 million. This makes French one of the fastest growing languages in the world.

Imma Tor, Director of French Language at the IOF, said that this “debunks the myth that French is a language in decline,” and that this was an old “cliché, with no evidence to back it up”. She added that thepresence of French on all continents, and its use across all sectors of business and society, placed it “alone, along with English, in displaying the characteristics of a truly global language”.

At the launch of the study on 12 November, Alexandre Wolff, the head of the IOF’s French Language Observatory, defined a Francophone as “a person who can express himself with relative ease in French”; a definition including those born into a French-speaking environment as well as those who speak it as a second language. He added that a person’s status as a francophone depended on their ability to use the language rather than the regularity with which they use it.

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Decline in Europe

French is the second most