The source says 6% for Rwanda, so not even close to being included. English has been replacing French as the main international language in Rwanda since the war and genocide in the 1990s.
Very surprising not to find Rwanda, Burundi, Mali or Burkina Faso here... In those countries the education starting from high school is often only in French, so even if it's only a minority I was expecting an highest turnout. Same for Madagascar
Same here. I travelled quite extensively in Africa and there's no way Equatorial Guinea or CAR are up there while Burkina Faso isn't... But hey those are figures from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. I guess they didn't do they job properly.
As a casual observer you likely have sampling bias. The people you are most likely to encounter are going to have better language skills than average. Only about 15% of Rwandans attend high school. Also, Rwanda is switching to English, so it will probably never make this list.
I'll take a look next time we update. I imagine that more African countries will be added to the list over time as formal schooling increases. Although there's also a chance that schools would choose to teach in English instead, which is the no-brainer move in terms of making your economy more competitive.
They still use the French (Latin) alphabet though. I've always found it weird that they chose to adopt that, given that they have a history of rejecting foreign influence (France, the US, China).
Well, without the Chinese influence, the Vietnamese wouldn't have had a writing system at all. And that writing system was so complicated that adopting another foreign system is downright efficient.
And to be fair, the Vietnamese alphabet bears more resemblance to Portuguese than to French, probably because Portuguese missionaries got there first before France officially started colonizing the area.
Neither were a lot of the answers in this quiz but Ghana is surrounded by French speaking nations and contains a lot of immigrants from those countries so while it isn't enough to make the list it would still be a perfectly reasonable guess.
The Vatican doesn't seem to like to keep records of anything, but I'm willing to bet 1/4 of their population can speak French. 100% of the population is at least bilingual. Easily the most polyglot nation on Earth.
Was really surprised Burkina Faso isn't on there! But after looking it up: despite it being the official language of business only 15% of the population speak French.
It's official, but apparently only 15% of the people actually use it on day-to-day basis. As it is part of the education system, I think you could argue it's likely more than 25% would be able to speak/understand French?
Not in my personal experience. I have NEVER heard French spoken there. In the capital, the languages are Bubi (native to the island) and Fang (the tribe that actually governs the country). When they speak to each other, it's in Spanish.
i feel like the percentages are really inaccurate, as an ivorian i can tell you that every ivorian i have ever met can speak french and are even losing the village languages. definetly need to check the statistics because i really disagree that more people speak french in portugal than mali, burkina faso etc.
While it could well be the case as the numbers are likely not entirely accurate, self-reporting is famously unreliable where linguistic studies are concerned.
Increased my score by 1 so now got 2/5 hopefully will increase again next time. I also tried Mali, Niger, Senegal, Burkina Faso as I thought these countries spoke french
And to be fair, the Vietnamese alphabet bears more resemblance to Portuguese than to French, probably because Portuguese missionaries got there first before France officially started colonizing the area.
As a Belgian I can say that only 40/45% of the country has French as mother tongue, the other 55/60% speaks Dutch ;-)
didn't think so much in Portugal though
Thanks, QM!