Les Pays Francophones: Overview

French is the official, co-official, or working language of around fifty states and territories on five continents, and is spoken — natively, daily, or fluently — by something between 280 and 320 million people. (The exact number depends on whether you count only first-language speakers, all daily speakers, or everyone with functional competence; the OIF, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, uses the broader figure.) This page sketches that map and introduces the small but important grammar that comes with it: how to name countries, choose the right preposition, and refer to peoples and their varieties of French.

The map of la francophonie

The word la francophonie has two distinct uses that learners often conflate. With a lowercase f, la francophonie refers to the entire community of French-speaking peoples around the world. With a capital F, la Francophonie refers specifically to the OIF, the international organization that brings these states together — analogous, very loosely, to the Commonwealth for English. Both senses are alive in journalistic prose.

The five main blocs:

• Europe. France (la France, ~67 million), French-speaking Belgium (la Belgique — Wallonia and Brussels, ~4.5 million speakers), French-speaking Switzerland (la Suisse romande, ~2 million speakers), Luxembourg (le Luxembourg, where French is one of three official languages), Monaco (Monaco), and the Aosta Valley in Italy (la Vallée d'Aoste, where French is co-official with Italian).
• North America. Quebec (le Québec, ~7 million native speakers), New Brunswick (le Nouveau-Brunswick, officially bilingual), Acadian communities in Atlantic Canada, Franco-Ontarian communities, and the historically francophone communities of Louisiana (la Louisiane — Cajun French) and New England.
• Africa. By far the largest francophone bloc by population. French is official or co-official in roughly twenty-one African states: in West Africa (le Sénégal, la Côte d'Ivoire, le Mali, le Burkina Faso, le Niger, la Guinée, le Bénin, le Togo), in Central Africa (le Cameroun, le Tchad, la République centrafricaine, le Gabon, la République démocratique du Congo, la République du Congo), in the Maghreb (le Maroc, l'Algérie, la Tunisie — where French is widespread but not officially designated), in the Horn (Djibouti), and on Indian Ocean islands (Madagascar, les Comores). Combined, more than half of the world's French speakers now live on the African continent, and demographic projections suggest the share will keep rising.
• The Caribbean. Haiti (Haïti — French is co-official with Haitian Creole), and the French overseas departments of Martinique (la Martinique) and Guadeloupe (la Guadeloupe), plus the collectivities of Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy.
• The Indian and Pacific Oceans. La Réunion and Mayotte (overseas departments), la Polynésie française (Tahiti and neighbouring islands), la Nouvelle-Calédonie, and Wallis-et-Futuna. Vanuatu, an independent state, also retains French as one of three official languages.

Gender of country names

Country names are nouns, and like all French nouns they have grammatical gender. The rule of thumb is: country names ending in -e in writing are feminine; almost all others are masculine. The rule is reliable enough to be worth memorizing, with a small set of exceptions.

The famous exceptions — masculine countries ending in -e — are le Mexique, le Mozambique, le Zimbabwe, le Cambodge, le Belize and le Zaïre (the former name of la République démocratique du Congo). These do not pattern with the feminine rule and must be memorized individually.

Country names ending in another vowel are masculine: le Pérou, le Honduras, le Bangladesh, le Vanuatu. Country names ending in a consonant are masculine: l'Iran, l'Irak, le Liban, le Sénégal. Plural country names are, predictably, plural: les États-Unis, les Pays-Bas, les Philippines, les Émirats arabes unis.

A small group of countries take no article at all, behaving more like proper names of cities: Cuba, Israël, Madagascar, Singapour, Haïti, Chypre, Maurice, Malte, Monaco. Some of these are islands, but not all — Israël and Singapour are part of this group too.

Prepositions for countries

The full system is treated on a dedicated page, but here is the working summary that you will use every time you say where someone is or where they are going.

• Feminine country, or masculine country starting with a vowel → en
  • bare name. en France, en Italie, en Iran, en Israël.
• Masculine country starting with a consonant → au
  • name with article. au Japon, au Canada, au Maroc.
• Plural country → aux
  • name with article. aux États-Unis, aux Pays-Bas.
• Article-less country → à
  • bare name. à Cuba, à Madagascar, à Singapour.

For origin, the same gender logic governs: feminine and vowel-initial masculine countries take de with no article (de France, d'Iran); masculine consonant-initial countries take du (du Japon); plural countries take des (des États-Unis); article-less countries take de alone (de Cuba).

Naming peoples and languages

Each country has an associated gentilic (a noun and adjective for its inhabitants) and, where applicable, the name of its language. The patterns are largely productive:

Two orthographic conventions catch English speakers out. First, the noun for an inhabitant is capitalized (un Français), but the adjective and language name are lowercase (un livre français, le français). English capitalizes all three. Second, the adjective and the language name are usually identical in form, distinguished only by syntactic context.

Capitals and continents

Continents follow the feminine pattern almost without exception: l'Europe, l'Afrique, l'Asie, l'Amérique du Nord, l'Amérique du Sud, l'Océanie. The exception is l'Antarctique, which is masculine. All of them take en for location and d' for origin.

Capital cities, like all cities, take the preposition à for location and de (often elided to d') for origin: à Paris, à Dakar, à Bruxelles, à Beyrouth — de Paris, de Dakar, d'Abidjan.

A handful of city names include an article — Le Caire (Cairo), Le Havre, La Nouvelle-Orléans, La Haye (The Hague) — and the article contracts with prepositions: au Caire, du Caire, à La Haye, de La Haye.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

Country names in French are gendered nouns with articles, and almost every grammatical fact about them follows from that. Feminine names end in -e (with a handful of exceptions); they take en for location and de for origin. Masculine names take au (or en before a vowel) and du. Plurals take aux and des. A small set of countries — most of them islands or small states — have no article and behave like city names with à and de.

The francophone world stretches across five continents and is shifting demographically toward Africa, where the great majority of French speakers will live within a generation. The standard reference variety is Hexagonal (Parisian) French, but every other variety — Belgian, Swiss, Quebec, African, Caribbean — has its own institutions, its own vocabulary, and its own legitimate norms. The remaining pages in this group cover each of the major francophone regions in turn.