† These figures are from Grimes (2000). The French Foreign Ministry’s francophonie website claims that there are 160 million first-language and second-language speakers. Leclerc (2000) states that 145 million people have been to school in French. Either figure might lift its rank above German, but not to the level of Portuguese.

* Je is a remnant of what was once a Latin pronoun of emphasis, ego (brutally reduced, after changing to something like eieu—cf. the Provençal equivalent, eu, ieu).

* There will be more to say of this retreat of French, from the viewpoint of the language that benefited from it, in the next chapter.

† The term, and the institution, continued in the Mediterranean until the nineteenth century, but the actual language used was based not on French but Italian, probably because of the later influence of merchants from Venice.

§ Eleanor (Aliénor) of Aquitaine (1122-1204) played a cardinal role as a cultural sponsor. She could hardly have been better connected in society, being the wife of two kings, mother of two, and the mother-in-law of yet two more. But in the mid-twelfth century she made her court at Poitiers a centre for courtly love poetry and historical narrative.

* It has continued to enjoy the sponsorship of the highest level in French government ever since, broken only during the Revolution in 1793-1803. Its first task was to compile a dictionary; the first edition took almost sixty years, coming out in 1694, but it has been updated periodically ever since, the latest edition, the eighth, appearing in 1992.

* Hence the bon mot of Antoine de Rivarol, in his Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française, of 1784: ’Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français!’ (’What is not clear is not French!’),

† ’Eh bien, mon prince, Gěnes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des, de la famille Buonaparte. Non. je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’ y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’ětes plus mon ami, vous n’ětes plus, comme vous dites.’

* In the eighteenth century, it yielded only to Spain; in the twentieth, only to Britain.

* Estimates of the French-speaking population of Algeria vary from the Ethnologue’s almost absurdly low 110,000 (out of a population of 30 million) to 25 per cent of the population (i.e. 7.5 million). Many believe that it is still the second-largest francophone population in the world, ahead of Quebec with 6.7 million, and Belgium with 4 million. (These latter figures also come from the Ethnologue—Grimes 2000.) It is widely believed that the Algerian government’s attempted ‘arabisation’ since 1962 has perversely increased use of other languages, notably Berber and French; but no survey data is available.

† One village he visited near Quebec City was known as ganāda, ‘settlement’ in the Huron language, which served as lingua franca along the river. This is the origin of the name Canada.

* The mission flourished, although it did not lead to any French settlement at the time; indeed, de Rhodes was the only Frenchman in a Jesuit team consisting of six Europeans and a Japanese.

However, the need to protect the missions was later used to justify the massive French invasion of Indo-china which came in 1859. And de Rhodes himself is significant as the man who devised the script now known as Quôc-ngu (, ‘National Language’), using Roman letters and accents. He had designed it as an aid to foreign missionaries learning Vietnamese. But in the late nineteenth century it was taken up, even by nationalists, as the key to mass literacy, and is now used universally in Vietnam.

* The poor Acadians were to fall victim to great power politics,