What does «francés» mean in Spanish?
- French, occasionally called Langue d'Oïl, is the third Roman language in terms of number of native speakers, after Spanish and Portuguese. French is spoken by some 200 million people, among whom 128 million "are able to cope with common communicative situations". French speakers are found mainly in Europe, Canada and Africa. It is an official language in 41 countries, most of which form what is called in French La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations. Descended from the Latin of the Roman Empire, its development was influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul (particularly in pronunciation), and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. This is one of the reasons why certain sounds and spellings of French are distinctly different from those of neighboring Romance languages and why Spanish and Italian sound more similar to each other than French does to either of them. A lingua franca in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, its international role then declined to the benefit of English. However, it has maintained some international recognition, being one of the two official languages of NATO and the IOC, and one of the two working languages of the United Nations Secretariat.