You are absolutely right. Also I do not believe that the percentage of french speakers in some of these countries like Equatorial Guinea for example are more than in a country like Guinea (formerly known as French Guinea)
Or you could just believe that despite Colonial Times, sometimes places that aren't France stop being like France? Maybe?
And sometimes stuff is weird in Geopolitical history and the complicated network of foreign influence across time and different nation, setting aside that it's with something as tangible as language?
Though French is the language of education in Chad and it is widely spoken in the cities, the most recent estimate I could find places the percentage of French speakers in Chad as a proportion of the entire population at just 13%. The language most commonly spoken in Chad is a local dialect of Chadian Arabic.
Fun fact - although the official languages of Chad are French and standard Arabic, most Chadians are not proficient in either of those languages. This is in part because over half of Chad's population is illiterate, and suffer from low-quality primary schooling assuming they have the opportunity to attend at all.
Actually, French seems to be on the way out in Lebanon, replaced by English. Virtually all signs, billboards etc. are in English. Only the old street-naming signs from colonial days seem to be in French. And in cafes etc., when you're clearly not a local, you'll be addressed in English, not French.
Lebanon was a French mandate between WWI and WWII (and also a part of the French "outremer" territories during the crusades if you want to go that far back). The countries have remained in close contact, both politically and culturally.
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.
Fun, the President of the "victims" still says it was better when the French were there, because at least they had infrastructures, railways, roads and hospitals
There are many countries who suffered at the hands of colonial France. Anyway, your point is silly. Creating public infrastructure in your colonies because you want to create new trade markets does not forgive the various massacres, genocides, and lack of human rights during the Age of Imperialism. Heck, France committed atrocities as late as the 1960s whilst trying to hold onto Algeria. Putting victims in quotation marks makes it sound like you think it's OK to do awful things to thousands of human being as longs as you make the economy better.
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?
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.
And sometimes stuff is weird in Geopolitical history and the complicated network of foreign influence across time and different nation, setting aside that it's with something as tangible as language?
Fun fact - although the official languages of Chad are French and standard Arabic, most Chadians are not proficient in either of those languages. This is in part because over half of Chad's population is illiterate, and suffer from low-quality primary schooling assuming they have the opportunity to attend at all.
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRmYeVJ58Fk
Whereas in West African countries, the rate is much higher than what you put.
A quiz like that is almost racist!