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Flavoring

A flavoring (or flavouring), also known as flavor (or flavour) or flavorant, is a food additive used to improve the taste or smell of food. It changes the perceptual impression of food as determined primarily by the chemoreceptors of the gustatory and olfactory systems. Along with additives, other components like sugars determine the taste of food.

A flavoring is defined as a substance that gives another substance taste, altering the characteristics of the solute, causing it to become sweet, sour, tangy, etc. Although the term, in common language, denotes the combined chemical sensations of taste and smell, the same term is used in the fragrance and flavors industry to refer to edible chemicals and extracts that alter the flavor of food and food products through the sense of smell.

Owing to the high cost, or unavailability of natural flavor extracts, most commercial flavorings are "nature-identical", which means that they are the chemical equivalent of natural flavors, but chemically synthesized rather than being extracted from source materials. Identification of components of natural foods, for example a raspberry, may be done using technology such as headspace techniques, so the flavorist can imitate the flavor by using a few of the same chemicals present. In the EU legislation, the term "natural-identical flavoring" does not exist. The legislation is specified on what is a "flavoring" and a "natural flavoring".

Definition
A flavoring is a volatile additive that improves the taste or smell of food. They work primarily via the sense of smell. In legislation, substances that exclusively have a sweet, sour or salty taste are not considered flavorings. These usually include flavor enhancers, sweeteners, acidulants and salt substitutes.

There are different ways to divide flavorings. First by the way they are produced. A vanilla flavoring can for example be obtained naturally by extraction from vanilla seeds, or one can start with cheap chemicals and try to make a similar substance artificially (in this example vanillin). A nature-identical flavoring is chemically an exact copy of the original substance and can be either natural or artificial. Vanillin is not obtained from the vanilla plant nor an exact copy of vanilla, but a synthesized nature-identical component of the vanilla aroma. Vanillin is not vanilla, but gives a food a vanilla aroma.

The second division is by the effect they have on smell (aroma) or taste of the food. The effect can be the aroma of a specific fruit, almond, butter, smoke from wood, or some fantasy flavor. The aroma of the flavoring may resemble that of the source, or imitate a particular unrelated food. It may for example be the extract from vanilla seeds and smell like vanilla, or it may be the extract of a potato and smell like a banana. Irrespective of the effect, the flavoring may be natural or artificial. It may for example be the natural tissue of an animal with the aroma of a citrus, or just a chemical that smells like a citrus.

Division by production method
Flavorings can be divided into three principal types: "natural flavorings", "nature-identical flavorings", and "artificial flavorings". In the United States, they are traditionally divided into natural and artificial flavorings, where the latter includes nature-identical flavorings. In contrast, European legislation does not distinguish natural and nature-identical flavorings, while only the term "natural" is subject to some regulation.

Natural flavorings
Natural flavorings are edible aroma compounds that are found in nature, not made by man. In nature, they always occur with other natural substances that also may be flavorings. By means of non-chemical technology, natural flavorings can be isolated on industrial scale, to be used as an additive.

Techniques to obtain natural flavorings include the use of enzymes and/or micro organisms. European legislators have accepted flavorings produced by manmade genetically modified organisms (GMO's) – not found in nature – as natural flavorings.

Nature-identical flavorings
Nature-identical flavorings are human-made aroma compounds that are chemically identical to some substance that can be found in nature. They are synthesized from chemicals or isolated by means of chemical processes.

Because nature-identical flavorings can be produced at low costs, the food industry will argue that nature-identical and natural flavorings are exactly the same. They have the advantage to be chemically pure, without allergens that may be coupled with natural flavorings. On the other hand, they are missing the synergy of other substances present in their natural origin, so they may lack subtlety.

Artificial flavorings
Artificial flavorings are synthesized from chemical substances by man and are not found in nature. Their sensory characteristics mostly resemble that of natural or nature-identical flavorings.

Perception of flavorings
Of the three chemical senses, smell is the main determinant of a food item's flavor. Aromas are the volatile components of the food. The aroma is determined by the aroma compounds it contains and the personal ability to detect them. While a flavoring primarily acts through the olfactory system, it also affects the taste at the same time.

Along with additives, other components like sugars determine the taste of food. The trigeminal nerves, which detect chemical irritants in the mouth and throat, as well as temperature and texture, are also important to the overall perception of food.

Mechanism
Flavors from food products are usually the result of a combination of natural flavors, which set up the basic smell profile of a food product, while artificial flavors modify the smell to accent it.

Unlike smelling, which occurs upon inhalation, the sensing of flavors in the mouth occurs in the exhalation phase of breathing and is perceived differently by an individual. In other words, the smell of food is different depending on whether one is smelling it before or after it has entered one's mouth.

Taste
The taste of a food product is not only determined by the aromas present in the original material and added flavorings, but also by accompanying substances like flavor enhancers, sweeteners, acidulants and salt substitutes. Polyols like sorbitol and maltitol, are carriers in flavorings, but they themselves also have a sweet taste.

Even the color of food can affect one's experience of the taste significantly. In one study, adding more red color to a drink increased the perceived sweetness, with darker colored solutions being rated 2–10% better than lighter ones, though it had 1% less sucrose concentration. Food manufacturers exploit this phenomenon; for example, different colors of the U.S. product Froot Loops cereal and most brands of Gummy Bears often use the same flavorings.

Flavor enhancers
Flavor enhancers or taste enhancers, which are umami or "savory" compounds, are themselves not flavorings, but they intensify the taste of the food. They are largely based on amino acids and nucleotides. These are typically used as sodium or calcium salts. Umami flavorings recognized and approved by the European Union include:

In Europe
Under the EU legislation, substances which have exclusively a sweet, sour or salty taste are not considered flavorings (Article 2, Regulation (EC) No 1334/2008.

Also flavor enhancers are not considered flavorings under the EU legislation but additives (Point 14 of Annex I of Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008).

EU legislation defines several types of flavorings:
 * flavoring substances (including "natural flavoring substances"):
 * flavoring preparations (by definition always natural):
 * thermal process flavorings
 * smoke flavorings
 * flavor precursors
 * other flavorings

In the EU, Regulation (EC) No 1334/2008 on flavorings and certain food ingredients with flavoring properties for use in/on foods, i.e. the EU Flavouring Regulation, was adopted on 16 December 2008 and entered into force on 20 January 2009. It applies from 20 January 2011. Regulation (EC) No 1334/2008 lays down general requirements for safe use of flavorings and provides definitions for different types of flavorings. The Regulation sets out substances for which an evaluation and approval is required. The Union list of flavoring substances, approved for use in and on foods, was adopted on 1 October 2012 and was introduced in Annex I of this Regulation

In the UK
The UK follows the above EU legislation which remains in force until 31 December 2020. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 provides that from 1 January 2021, this directly applicable EU legislation will be converted into UK law with minor corrections to enable it to operate effectively as UK law. These corrections have been made by Statutory Instrument 2019 No. 860.

The UK Food industry, in collaboration with the flavoring industry, has developed guidance on what to consider when declaring a pictorial representation of a food ingredient on the label of a pre-packed product.

In the United States
In the United States, flavorings are regulated in Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations. They are divided into artificial and natural flavorings.

In Australia and New Zealand
In Australia and New Zealand regulation of flavorings is covered by the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code of November 2000, entered into force in December 2002.

Natural flavorings are obtained from plant or animal raw materials, by physical, microbiological, or enzymatic processes. They can be either used in their natural state or processed for human consumption, but cannot contain any nature-identical or artificial flavoring substances.

Nature-identical flavorings are obtained by synthesis or isolated through chemical processes, which are chemically and organoleptically identical to flavoring substances naturally present in products intended for human consumption. They cannot contain any artificial flavoring substances.

Artificial flavorings are "flavouring substances not identified in a natural product intended for human consumption, whether or not the product is processed."

Regulations on natural flavoring
In the EU, in order to be labeled as natural flavoring substance, many conditions have to be fulfilled: "Natural flavouring substance" shall mean a flavoring substance obtained by appropriate physical, enzymatic or microbiological processes from material of vegetable, animal or microbiological origin either in the raw state or after processing for human consumption by one or more of the traditional food preparation processes listed in Annex II. Natural flavoring substances correspond to substances that are naturally present and have been identified in nature (Article 3).

More detailed information on the Production of Natural Flavouring Substances and (Natural) Flavouring Preparations can be found on the European Flavour Association (EFFA) Guidance Document.

UK Food Law defines a natural flavor as:

"A flavouring substance (or flavouring substances) which is (or are) obtained, by physical, enzymatic, or microbiological processes, from material of vegetable or animal origin which material is either raw or has been subjected to a process normally used in preparing food for human consumption and to no process other than one normally so used"

The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations describes a "natural flavoring" as: "The essential oil, oleoresin, essence, or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating, or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit, or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf, or any other edible portions of a plant, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose primary function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional."

Dietary restrictions
Food manufacturers are sometimes reluctant to inform consumers about the source and identity of flavor ingredients and whether they have been produced with the incorporation of substances such as animal byproducts. Some flavor ingredients, such as gelatin, are produced from animal products. Some, such as glycerin, can be derived from either animal or vegetable sources. And some extracts, such as vanilla, may contain alcohol. Many groups such as Jews, Jains, Hindus, and Muslims, as well as vegans follow dietary restrictions which disallow the use of animal byproducts and/or alcohol in certain contexts. In many Western countries, some consumers rely on a Jewish kosher pareve certification mark to indicate that natural flavorings used in a food product are free of meat and dairy (although they can still contain fish). The Vegan Society's Sunflower symbol (which is currently used by over 260 companies worldwide) can also be used to see which products do not use any animal ingredients (including flavorings and colorings).

Similarly, persons with known sensitivities or allergies to food products are advised to avoid foods that contain generic "natural flavors" or to first determine the source of the flavoring before consuming the food. Such flavors may be derived from a variety of source products that are themselves common allergens, such as dairy, soy, sesame, eggs, and nuts. In the EU, nevertheless, this information is available in the labeling. Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers, states in article 9 that any ingredient or processing aid listed in Annex II (of the aforementioned Regulation) or derived from a substance or product listed in Annex II causing allergies or intolerances used in the manufacture or preparation of a food and still present in the finished product, even if in an altered form must be included in the labeling.

Flavor creation
Most artificial flavors are specific and often complex mixtures of singular naturally occurring flavor compounds combined to either imitate or enhance a natural flavor. These mixtures are formulated by flavorists to give a food product a unique flavor and to maintain flavor consistency between different product batches or after recipe changes. The list of known flavoring agents includes thousands of molecular compounds, and flavor chemists (flavorists) can often mix these together to produce many of the common flavors. Many flavorings consist of esters, which are often described as being sweet or fruity.

The compounds used to produce artificial flavors are almost identical to those that occur naturally. It has been suggested that artificial flavors may be safer to consume than natural flavors due to the standards of purity and mixture consistency that are enforced either by the company or by law. Natural flavors, in contrast, may contain impurities from their sources, while artificial flavors are typically more pure and are required to undergo more testing before being sold for consumption.

Food and beverage companies may require flavors for new products, product line extensions (e.g., low fat versions of existing products), or changes in formula or processing for existing products. In 2011, about US$10.6 billion were generated with the sale of flavors; the majority of the flavors used are consumed in ultra-processed food and convenience food.

The number of food smells is unbounded; a food's flavor, therefore, can be easily altered by changing its smell while keeping its taste similar. This is exemplified in artificially flavored jellies, soft drinks and candies, which, while made of bases with a similar taste, have dramatically different flavors due to the use of different scents or fragrances.

Most flavors represent a mixture of aroma compounds, the raw material that is produced by flavor companies. In rare cases, a single synthetic compound is used in pure form. Artificial vanilla flavors vanillin and ethylvanillin are a notable exception, as well as the artificial strawberry flavor (ethyl methylphenylglycidate). The ubiquitous "green apple" aroma is based on hexyl acetate.

Determination
Few standards are available or being prepared for sensory analysis of flavors. In chemical analysis of flavors, solid phase extraction, solid phase microextraction, and headspace gas chromatography are applied to extract and separate the flavor compounds in the sample. The determination is typically done by various mass spectrometric techniques. A flavor lexicon can aid the development of objective language for food.

title: Flavoring


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Wikipedia talk:Free links

I wanted to Free Links page to be nice and clear for everyone to use as a reference, so I moved some clutter here.

Excellent! Now, is there a way to automate the conversion of old-style links (and pages) to new-style links? I seem to remember Cliff saying something about doing this. For example, I would like to convert links that look like LarrysText to Larry's Text; then it would be cool also to convert the pages themselves, in this case to Larry's Text (since apostrophes are not allowed in page names). What are the chances of this happening anytime soon? -- Larry Sanger

Why doesn't my Free Links work correctly. Is it because they contain non-ASCII characters? Look at Sweden for Göteborg and Malmö. LinusTolke

Fixing the non-ASCII character problem should be relatively easy. A similar problem has already been solved in the world of IMAP in the i18n of mailbox names, and the solution was to use modified UTF-7 encoding. For a complete explanation, please see RFC 2060, section 5.1.3. The short version is that M-UTF-7 uses US-ASCII representation for US-ASCII characters, and "shifts" into modified BASE 64 for all other charsets (UNICODE 16-bit octets).

Although I don't have a library routine I can whip out for you, I'm sure you can find one somewhere to hack up for Wikipedia. - Flavor

We might have to use something like UTF-7 to encode URLs for the Japanese pages or for other languages. But for the more common ones that fit within the normal ISO-8859-1 range (Spanish, French, German, et al.) it might be better to anglicise for the purpose of searching. I can imagine, for example, English-speaking people who might want to read a French page about Paris, or a German page about Kurt Gödel. I can imagine people (perhaps even Germans used to English web sites) searching for "Godel" or "Goedel", but I can't imagine them ever searching for "G+APY-del" (the UTF-7 rendering). Of course, the software could do that in the background, but I think taking advantage of 8-bit ISOwould generate more links and hits.

"Free Links" should be moved to "free links"
"Free links" is not capitalized. --2004-12-29T22:45Z 05:15, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Arguments for and against
Free links are useful for the legibility of links within the wiki; they're titled like how they're linked. However, those who advocate for CamelCases say that too much spaces tend to clutter up the URL or lead to all-space links. . Personally, I favor free links because my first and currently-primary wiki experience was with Wikipedia's wikitext. But I have seen the other linking options offered in the usemodwiki article, and some of those seem like they could be useful in certain situations. --Toussaint 14:35, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Merge with Wiki markup
Despite the fact that this page has been around since 2001, there is very little useful information, and certainly not enough information to warrant a page of its own. A brief description in Wiki markup with this page redirecting there would be better.  Giftiger Wunsch    [TALK]  14:40, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Wikipedia talk:Free links


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Frisian languages

The Frisian languages ( or   ) are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 400,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages; the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group and together with the Low German dialects these form the North Sea Germanic languages. However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, owing to independent linguistic innovations and language contact with neighboring languages.

There are three different branches of Frisian, which are usually called Frisian languages, despite the fact that dialects within those branches may not be mutually intelligible. The three branches are: West Frisian, which is by far the most spoken of the three and is an official language in the Dutch province of Friesland, where it is spoken on the mainland and on two of the West Frisian Islands: Terschelling and Schiermonnikoog. It is also spoken in four villages in the Westerkwartier of the neighbouring province of Groningen. North Frisian, the second branch, is spoken in the northernmost German district of Nordfriesland in the state of Schleswig-Holstein: on the North Frisian mainland, and on the North Frisian Islands of Sylt, Föhr, Amrum, and the Halligs. It is also spoken on the islands of Heligoland (deät Lun) and Düne (de Halem), in the North Sea. The third Frisian branch, East Frisian, has only one remaining variant, Sater Frisian, spoken in the municipality of Saterland in the Lower Saxon district of Cloppenburg. Surrounded by bogs, the four Saterlandic villages lie just outside the borders of East Frisia, in the Oldenburg Münsterland region. In East Frisia proper, East Frisian Low Saxon is spoken today, which is not a Frisian language, but a variant of Low German/Low Saxon.

Depending upon their location, the six Frisian languages have been heavily influenced by and bear similarities to Dutch and Low German/Low Saxon, and in addition North Frisian has a Danish substrate. However, Frisian is still unintelligible to Dutch; a cloze test in 2005 revealed that Dutch respondents understood 31.9% of a West Frisian newspaper, 66.4% of an Afrikaans newspaper and 97.1% of a Dutch newspaper. Additional shared linguistic characteristics between Friesland and the Great Yarmouth area in England are likely to have resulted from the close trading relationship these areas maintained during the centuries-long Hanseatic League of the Late Middle Ages.

Division
There are three main groups of Frisian varieties: West Frisian, Saterland Frisian, and North Frisian. Some linguists consider these three varieties, despite their mutual unintelligibility, to be dialects of one single Frisian language, whereas others consider them to be a number of separate languages equal to or greater than the number of main branches discussed here. Indeed, the insular varieties of West Frisian are not intelligible to the mainland, and by that standard are additional languages, and North Frisian is also divided into several strongly diverse dialects, which are not all mutually intelligible among themselves. West Frisian is strongly influenced by Dutch. The other Frisian languages, meanwhile, have been influenced by Low German and German. Stadsfries and West Frisian Dutch are not Frisian, but Dutch dialects influenced by West Frisian. Frisian is called Frysk in West Frisian, Fräisk in Saterland Frisian, and Friisk, fresk, freesk, frasch, fräisch, and freesch in the varieties of North Frisian.

The situation in the Dutch province of Groningen and the German region of East Frisia is similar: The local Low German/Low Saxon dialects of Gronings and East Frisian Low Saxon still bear some Frisian elements due to East Frisian substrate. Frisian was spoken there at one time, only to have been gradually replaced by Low Saxon since the Middle Ages. This local language is now, like Frisian, under threat by standard Dutch and German.

Speakers
Most Frisian speakers live in the Netherlands, primarily in the province of Friesland, which since 1997 officially uses its West Frisian name of Fryslân, where the number of native speakers is about 400,000, which is about 75% of the inhabitants of Friesland. An increasing number of native Dutch speakers in the province are learning Frisian as a second language.

In Germany, there are about 2,000 speakers of Saterland Frisian in the marshy Saterland region of Lower Saxony. Saterland Frisian has resisted encroachment from Low German and Standard German, but Saterland Frisian still remains seriously endangered because of the small size of the speech community and of the lack of institutional support to help preserve and spread the language.

In the North Frisia (Nordfriesland) region of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, there were 10,000 North Frisian speakers. Although many of these live on the mainland, most are found on the islands, notably Sylt, Föhr, Amrum, and Heligoland. The local corresponding North Frisian dialects are still in use.

West Frisian-Dutch bilinguals are split into two categories: Speakers who had Dutch as their first language tended to maintain the Dutch system of homophony between plural and linking suffixes when speaking West Frisian, by using the West Frisian plural as a linking morpheme. Speakers who had West Frisian as their first language often maintained the West Frisian system of no homophony when speaking West Frisian.

Status
Saterland and North Frisian are officially recognised and protected as minority languages in Germany, and West Frisian is one of the two official languages in the Netherlands, the other being Dutch. ISO 639-1 code  and ISO 639-2 code   were assigned to "Frisian", but that was changed in November 2005 to "Western Frisian". According to the ISO 639 Registration Authority the "previous usage of [this] code has been for Western Frisian, although [the] language name was 'Frisian.

The new ISO 639 code  is used for the Saterland Frisian language, a variety of Eastern Frisian (not to be confused with East Frisian Low Saxon, a West Low German dialect). The new ISO 639 code  is used for the North Frisian language variants spoken in parts of Schleswig-Holstein.

The Ried fan de Fryske Beweging is an organization which works for the preservation of the West Frisian language and culture in the Dutch province of Friesland. The Fryske Academy also plays a large role, since its foundation in 1938, to conduct research on Frisian language, history, and society, including attempts at forming a larger dictionary. Recent attempts have allowed Frisian be used somewhat more in some of the domains of education, media and public administration. Nevertheless, Saterland Frisian and most dialects of North Frisian are seriously endangered and West Frisian is considered as vulnerable to being endangered. Moreover, for all advances in integrating Frisian in daily life, there is still a lack of education and media awareness of the Frisian language, perhaps reflecting its rural origins and its lack of prestige Therefore, in a sociological sense it is considered more a dialect than a standard language, even though linguistically it is a separate language.

For L2 speakers, both the quality and amount of time Frisian is taught in the classroom is low, concluding that Frisian lessons do not contribute meaningfully to the linguistic and cultural development of the students. Moreover, Frisian runs the risk of dissolving into Dutch, especially in Friesland, where both languages are used.

Old Frisian
In the Early Middle Ages the Frisian lands stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the river Weser, in northern Germany. At that time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast. Today this region is sometimes referred to as Great Frisia or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage, even though in most places the Frisian languages have been lost.

Frisian is the language most closely related to English and Scots, but after at least five hundred years of being subject to the influence of Dutch, modern Frisian in some aspects bears a greater similarity to Dutch than to English; one must also take into account the centuries-long drift of English away from Frisian. Thus the two languages have become less mutually intelligible over time, partly due to the influence which Dutch and Low German have had on Frisian, and partly due to the vast influence some languages (in particular Norman French) have had on English throughout the centuries.

Old Frisian, however, was very similar to Old English. Historically, both English and Frisian are marked by the loss of the Germanic nasal in words like us (ús; uns in German), soft (sêft; sanft) or goose (goes; Gans): see Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law. Also, when followed by some vowels, the Germanic k softened to a ch sound; for example, the Frisian for cheese and church is tsiis and tsjerke, whereas in Dutch it is kaas and kerk, and in High German the respective words are Käse and Kirche. Contrarily, this did not happen for chin and choose, which are kin and kieze.

One rhyme demonstrates the palpable similarity between Frisian and English: "Butter, bread and green cheese is good English and good Frisian," which is pronounced more or less the same in both languages (West Frisian: "Bûter, brea en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.")

One major difference between Old Frisian and modern Frisian is that in the Old Frisian period (c. 1150) grammatical cases still existed. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the 12th or 13th, but most are from the 14th and 15th centuries. Generally, all these texts are restricted to legalistic writings. Although the earliest definite written examples of Frisian are from approximately the 9th century, there are a few examples of runic inscriptions from the region which are probably older and possibly in the Frisian language. These runic writings however usually do not amount to more than single- or few-word inscriptions, and cannot be said to constitute literature as such. The transition from the Old Frisian to the Middle Frisian period (c.1550-c.1820) in the 16th century is based on the fairly abrupt halt in the use of Frisian as a written language.

Middle West Frisian
Up until the 15th century, Frisian was a language widely spoken and written, but from 1500 onwards it became an almost exclusively oral language, mainly used in rural areas. This was in part due to the occupation of its stronghold, the Dutch province of Friesland (Fryslân), in 1498, by Albert III, Duke of Saxony, who replaced West Frisian as the language of government with Dutch.

Afterwards this practice was continued under the Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands (the German Emperor Charles V and his son, the Spanish King Philip II), and even when the Netherlands became independent, in 1585, West Frisian did not regain its former status. The reason for this was the rise of Holland as the dominant part of the Netherlands, and its language, Dutch, as the dominant language in judicial, administrative and religious affairs.

In this period the great Frisian poet Gysbert Japiks (1603–66), a schoolteacher and cantor from the city of Bolsward, who largely fathered modern West Frisian literature and orthography, was really an exception to the rule.

His example was not followed until the 19th century, when entire generations of West Frisian authors and poets appeared. This coincided with the introduction of the so-called newer breaking system, a prominent grammatical feature in almost all West Frisian dialects, with the notable exception of Southwest Frisian. Therefore, the Modern West Frisian period is considered to have begun at this point in time, around 1820.

Modern West Frisian
The revival of the West Frisian Language was led by the poet Gysbert Japiks, who had begun to write in the language as a way to show that it was possible, and created a collective West Frisian identity and West Frisian standard of writing through his poetry. Later on, Johannes Hilarides would build off Gysbert Japiks' work by building on West Frisian orthography, particularly on its pronunciation; he also, unlike Japiks, set a standard of the West Frisian language that focused more heavily on how the common people used it as an everyday language.

Perhaps the most important figure in the spreading of the West Frisian language was J. H. Halbertsma (1789–1869), who translated many works into the West Frisian language, such as the New Testament He had however, like Hilarides, focused mostly on the vernacular of the West Frisian language, where he focused on translating texts, plays and songs for the lower and middle classes in order to teach and expand the West Frisian language. This had begun the effort to continuously preserve the West Frisian language, which continues unto this day. It was however not until the first half of the 20th century that the West Frisian revival movement began to gain strength, not only through its language, but also through its culture and history, supporting singing and acting in West Frisian in order to facilitate West Frisian speaking.

It was not until 1960 that Dutch began to dominate West Frisian in Friesland; with many non-Frisian immigrants into Friesland, the language gradually began to diminish, and survives now only due to the constant effort of scholars and organisations. In recent years, it has been the province of Friesland, rather than the language itself, that has become a more important part of the West Frisian identity; as such, the language has become less important for cultural preservation purposes. It is especially written West Frisian that seems to have trouble surviving, with only 30% of the West Frisian population competent in it; it went out of use in the 16th century and continues to be barely taught today.

Family tree
Frisian languages belong to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages, the most widespread language family in Europe and the world. Its closest living genealogical relatives are the Anglic languages, i.e. English and Scots (Anglo-Frisian languages); together with the also closely related Low Saxon dialects the two groups make up the group of North Sea Germanic languages.

 * Frisian
 * West Frisian, spoken in the Netherlands
 * Hindeloopen Frisian
 * Schiermonnikoogs
 * Westlauwers–Terschelling Frisian
 * Terschellings (Oosterend and West-Terschelling dialects)
 * Western Frisian proper
 * Clay Frisian (Klaaifrysk, incl. Westereendersk)
 * Wood Frisian (Wâldfrysk)
 * South Frisian (Súdhoeks)
 * East Frisian, spoken in Lower Saxony, Germany
 * Ems Frisian dialects
 * Saterland Frisian
 * Several extinct dialects
 * Weser Frisian dialects
 * Wangerooge Frisian (extinct)
 * Wursten Frisian (extinct)
 * Several extinct dialects
 * North Frisian, spoken in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
 * Mainland dialects
 * Bökingharde Frisian
 * Northern Goesharde Frisian
 * Middle Goesharde Frisian
 * Southern Goesharde Frisian (extinct)
 * Wiedingharde Frisian
 * Halligen Frisian
 * Karrharde FrisianFrisian.jpg
 * Island dialects
 * Söl'ring
 * Fering-Öömrang
 * Heligolandic (Halunder)
 * Extinct dialects
 * Strand Frisian
 * Eiderstedt Frisian

The Lord's Prayer
NB:
 * See also West Frisian language.
 * Which was changed to "who", in earth to "on earth," and them that to "those who" in the 1928 version of the Church of England prayer book and used in other later Anglican prayer books too. However, the words given here are those of the original 1662 book as stated.

Comparative Germanic sentences
NB: These are not always literal translations of each other.
 * The boy stroked the girl about the chin and kissed her on the cheeks.
 * Saterland Frisian: Die Wänt strookede dät Wucht uum ju Keeuwe un oapede hier ap do Sooken.
 * North Frisian (Mooring dialect): Di dreng aide dåt foomen am dåt kan än mäket har aw da siike.
 * Nordfriesisch (Söl'ring): Di Dreeng strekt dit faamen om't Ken en taatjet / kleepet höör üp di Sjaken
 * West Frisian: De jonge streake it famke om it kin en tute har op 'e wangen.
 * Gronings: t Jong fleerde t wicht om kinne tou en smokte heur op wange.
 * East Frisian Low Saxon: De Jung (Fent) straktde dat Wicht um't Kinn to un tuutjede hör up de Wangen.
 * Der Junge streichelte das Mädchen ums Kinn und küsste es (sie) auf die Wangen.
 * De jongen aaide (streelde, streek) het meisje langs/over haar/de kin en kuste/zoende haar op de wangen.
 * Afrikaans: Die seun streel die meisie oor haar/die ken en soen haar op die wange.
 * Drengen strøg/aede pigen på hagen og kyssede hende på kinderne.
 * Norwegian (Bokmål): Gutten strøk jenta på haken og kysset henne på kinnene.
 * Norwegian (Nynorsk): Guten strauk jenta på haka og kyssa henne på kinna.

General references

 * Omniglot links to various Frisian resources
 * Tresoar – Historical and Literary Centre of Friesland Province of the Netherlands

title: Frisian languages


text:
French language

French (français,, or langue française, , or by some speakers, ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to the French colonial empire, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.

French is an official language in 27 countries and is spoken across all continents. French is also one of the most geographically widespread languages in the world, with about 50 countries and territories having it as a de jure or de facto official, administrative, or cultural language. Most of these countries are members of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), the community of 54 member states which share the official use or teaching of French. French is also one of six official languages used in the United Nations. It is spoken as a first language (in descending order of the number of speakers) in France; Canada (especially in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick); Belgium (Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region); western Switzerland (specifically the cantons forming the Romandy region); parts of Luxembourg; parts of the United States (the states of Louisiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont); Monaco; the Aosta Valley region of Italy; and various communities elsewhere.

In 2015, approximately 40% of the francophone population (including L2 and partial speakers) lived in Europe, 36% in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean, 15% in North Africa and the Middle East, 8% in the Americas, and 1% in Asia and Oceania. French is the second-most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union. Of Europeans who speak other languages natively, approximately one-fifth are able to speak French as a second language. French is the second-most taught foreign language in the EU. All institutions of the EU use French as a working language along with English and German; in certain institutions, French is the sole working language (e.g. at the Court of Justice of the European Union). French is also the 16th most natively spoken language in the world, fifth most spoken language by total number of speakers and is on the top five of the most studied languages worldwide (with about 120 million learners as of 2017). As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, French was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, particularly Gabon, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast.

French is estimated to have about 76 million native speakers; about 235 million daily, fluent speakers; and another 77–110 million secondary speakers who speak it as a second language to varying degrees of proficiency, mainly in Africa. According to the OIF, approximately 321 million people worldwide are "able to speak the language", without specifying the criteria for this estimation or whom it encompasses. According to a demographic projection led by the Université Laval and the Réseau Démographie de l'Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, the total number of French speakers will reach approximately 500 million in 2025 and 650 million by 2050. OIF estimates 700 million by 2050, 80% of whom will be in Africa.

French has a long history as an international language of literature and scientific standards and is a primary or second language of many international organisations including the United Nations, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Olympic Committee, the General Conference on Weights and Measures, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese.

History
French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that evolved out of the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in northern France. The language's early forms include Old French and Middle French.

Vulgar Latin in Gaul
Due to Roman rule, Latin was gradually adopted by the inhabitants of Gaul, and as the language was learned by the common people it developed a distinct local character, with grammatical differences from Latin as spoken elsewhere, some of which being attested on graffiti. This local variety evolved into the Gallo-Romance tongues, which include French and its closest relatives, such as Arpitan.

The evolution of Latin in Gaul was shaped by its coexistence for over half a millennium beside the native Celtic Gaulish language, which did not go extinct until the late sixth century, long after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The population remained 90% indigenous in origin; the Romanizing class were the local native elite (not Roman settlers), whose children learned Latin in Roman schools. At the time of the collapse of the Empire, this local elite had been slowly abandoning Gaulish entirely, but the rural and lower class populations remained Gaulish speakers who could sometimes also speak Latin or Greek. The final language shift from Gaulish to Vulgar Latin among rural and lower class populations occurred later, when both they and the incoming Frankish ruler/military class adopted the Gallo-Roman Vulgar Latin speech of the urban intellectual elite.

The Gaulish language likely survived into the sixth century in France despite considerable Romanization. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French contributing loanwords and calques (including oui, the word for "yes"), sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence,  and influences in conjugation and word order. Recent computational studies suggest that early gender shifts may have been motivated by the gender of the corresponding word in Gaulish.

The estimated number of French words that can be attributed to Gaulish is placed at 154 by the Petit Robert, which is often viewed as representing standardized French, while if non-standard dialects are included, the number increases to 240. Known Gaulish loans are skewed toward certain semantic fields, such as plant life (chêne, bille, etc.), animals (mouton, cheval, etc.), nature (boue, etc.), domestic activities (ex. berceau), farming and rural units of measure (arpent, lieue, borne, boisseau), weapons, and products traded regionally rather than further afield. This semantic distribution has been attributed to peasants being the last to hold onto Gaulish.

Old French
The beginning of French in Gaul was greatly influenced by Germanic invasions into the country. These invasions had the greatest impact on the northern part of the country and on the language there. A language divide began to grow across the country. The population in the north spoke langue d'oïl while the population in the south spoke langue d'oc. Langue d'oïl grew into what is known as Old French. The period of Old French spanned between the 8th and 14th centuries. Old French shared many characteristics with Latin. For example, Old French made use of different possible word orders just as Latin did because it had a case system that retained the difference between nominative subjects and oblique non-subjects. The period is marked by a heavy superstrate influence from the Germanic Frankish language, which non-exhaustively included the use in upper-class speech and higher registers of V2 word order, a large percentage of the vocabulary (now at around 15% of modern French vocabulary ) including the impersonal singular pronoun on (a calque of Germanic man), and the name of the language itself.

Up until its later stages, Old French, alongside Old Occitan, maintained a relic of the old nominal case system of Latin longer than most other Romance languages (with the notable exception of Romanian which still currently maintains a case distinction), differentiating between an oblique case and a nominative case. The phonology was characterized by heavy syllabic stress, which led to the emergence of various complicated diphthongs such as -eau which would later be leveled to monophthongs.

The earliest evidence of what became Old French can be seen in the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, while Old French literature began to be produced in the eleventh century, with major early works often focusing on the lives of saints (such as the Vie de Saint Alexis), or wars and royal courts, notably including the Chanson de Roland, epic cycles focused on King Arthur and his court, as well as a cycle focused on William of Orange.

Middle French
Within Old French many dialects emerged but the Francien dialect is one that not only continued but also thrived during the Middle French period (14th–17th centuries). Modern French grew out of this Francien dialect. Grammatically, during the period of Middle French, noun declensions were lost and there began to be standardized rules. Robert Estienne published the first Latin-French dictionary, which included information about phonetics, etymology, and grammar. Politically, the first government authority to adopt Modern French as official was the Aosta Valley in 1536, while the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) named French the language of law in the Kingdom of France.

Modern French
During the 17th century, French replaced Latin as the most important language of diplomacy and international relations (lingua franca). It retained this role until approximately the middle of the 20th century, when it was replaced by English as the United States became the dominant global power following the Second World War. Stanley Meisler of the Los Angeles Times said that the fact that the Treaty of Versailles was written in English as well as French was the "first diplomatic blow" against the language.

During the Grand Siècle (17th century), France, under the rule of powerful leaders such as Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV, enjoyed a period of prosperity and prominence among European nations. Richelieu established the Académie française to protect the French language. By the early 1800s, Parisian French had become the primary language of the aristocracy in France.

Near the beginning of the 19th century, the French government began to pursue policies with the end goal of eradicating the many minorities and regional languages (patois) spoken in France. This began in 1794 with Henri Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the use of the French language". When public education was made compulsory, only French was taught and the use of any other (patois) language was punished. The goals of the public school system were made especially clear to the French-speaking teachers sent to teach students in regions such as Occitania and Brittany. Instructions given by a French official to teachers in the department of Finistère, in western Brittany, included the following: "And remember, Gents: you were given your position in order to kill the Breton language". The prefect of Basses-Pyrénées in the French Basque Country wrote in 1846: "Our schools in the Basque Country are particularly meant to replace the Basque language with French..." Students were taught that their ancestral languages were inferior and they should be ashamed of them; this process was known in the Occitan-speaking region as Vergonha.

Europe
Spoken by 19.71% of the European Union's population, French is the third most widely spoken language in the EU, after English and German and the second-most-widely taught language after English.

Under the Constitution of France, French has been the official language of the Republic since 1992, although the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts made it mandatory for legal documents in 1539. France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education except in specific cases, and legal contracts; advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words.

In Belgium, French is an official language at the federal level along with Dutch and German. At the regional level, French is the sole official language of Wallonia (excluding a part of the East Cantons, which are German-speaking) and one of the two official languages—along with Dutch—of the Brussels-Capital Region, where it is spoken by the majority of the population (approx. 80%), often as their primary language.

French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian, and Romansh, and is spoken in the western part of Switzerland, called Romandy, of which Geneva is the largest city. The language divisions in Switzerland do not coincide with political subdivisions, and some cantons have bilingual status: for example, cities such as Biel/Bienne and cantons such as Valais, Fribourg and Bern. French is the native language of about 23% of the Swiss population, and is spoken by 50% of the population.

Along with Luxembourgish and German, French is one of the three official languages of Luxembourg, where it is generally the preferred language of business as well as of the different public administrations. It is also the official language of Monaco.

At a regional level, French is acknowledged as an official language in the Aosta Valley region of Italy where it is the first language of approximately 50% of the population, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. It is also spoken in Andorra and is the main language after Catalan in El Pas de la Casa. The language is taught as the primary second language in the German state of Saarland, with French being taught from pre-school and over 43% of citizens being able to speak French.

Africa
[[File:Francophone Africa.svg|thumb|{{legend|#006BA8|Countries usually considered part of Francophone Africa

Their population was 487.6 million in 2023, and it is forecast to reach between 870 million and 879 million in 2050.}} {{legend|#00AAE2|Countries sometimes considered as Francophone Africa}}{{legend|#008080|Countries that are not Francophone but are Members or Observers of the OIF}}]]

The majority of the world's French-speaking population lives in Africa. According to a 2023 estimate from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, an estimated 167 million African people spread across 35 countries and territories can speak French as either a first or a second language. This number does not include the people living in non-Francophone African countries who have learned French as a foreign language. Due to the rise of French in Africa, the total French-speaking population worldwide is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050. French is the fastest growing language on the continent (in terms of either official or foreign languages).

French is mostly a second language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Libreville, Gabon, and Antananarivo.

There is not a single African French, but multiple forms that diverged through contact with various indigenous African languages.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth. It is also where the language has evolved the most in recent years. Some vernacular forms of French in Africa can be difficult to understand for French speakers from other countries, but written forms of the language are very closely related to those of the rest of the French-speaking world.

Canada
French is the second-most common language in Canada, after English, and both are official languages at the federal level. It is the first language of 9.5 million people or 29% and the second language for 2.07 million or 6% of the entire population of Canada. French is the sole official language in the province of Quebec, being the mother tongue for some 7 million people, or almost 80% (2006 Census) of the province. About 95% of the people of Quebec speak French as either their first or second language, and for some as their third language. Quebec is also home to the city of Montreal, which is the world's fourth-largest French-speaking city, by number of first language speakers. New Brunswick and Manitoba are the only officially bilingual provinces, though full bilingualism is enacted only in New Brunswick, where about one third of the population is Francophone. French is also an official language of all of the territories (Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon). Out of the three, Yukon has the most French speakers, making up just under 4% of the population. Furthermore, while French is not an official language in Ontario, the French Language Services Act ensures that provincial services are to be available in the language. The Act applies to areas of the province where there are significant Francophone communities, namely Eastern Ontario and Northern Ontario. Elsewhere, sizable French-speaking minorities are found in southern Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and the Port au Port Peninsula in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the unique Newfoundland French dialect was historically spoken. Smaller pockets of French speakers exist in all other provinces. The Ontarian city of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, is also effectively bilingual, as it has a large population of federal government workers, who are required to offer services in both French and English, and is across a river from Quebec, opposite the major city of Gatineau with which it forms a single metropolitan area.

United States
According to the United States Census Bureau (2011), French is the fourth most spoken language in the United States after English, Spanish, and Chinese, when all forms of French are considered together and all dialects of Chinese are similarly combined. French is the second-most spoken language (after English) in the states of Maine and New Hampshire. In Louisiana, it is tied with Spanish for second-most spoken if Louisiana French and all creoles such as Haitian are included. French is the third most spoken language (after English and Spanish) in the states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Louisiana is home to many distinct French dialects, collectively known as Louisiana French. New England French, essentially a variant of Canadian French, is spoken in parts of New England. Missouri French was historically spoken in Missouri and Illinois (formerly known as Upper Louisiana), but is nearly extinct today. French also survived in isolated pockets along the Gulf Coast of what was previously French Lower Louisiana, such as Mon Louis Island, Alabama and DeLisle, Mississippi (the latter only being discovered by linguists in the 1990s) but these varieties are severely endangered or presumed extinct.

Caribbean
French is one of two official languages in Haiti alongside Haitian Creole. It is the principal language of education, administration, business, and public signage and is spoken by all educated Haitians. It is also used for ceremonial events such as weddings, graduations, and church masses. The vast majority of the population speaks Haitian Creole as their first language; the rest largely speak French as a first language. As a French Creole language, Haitian Creole draws the large majority of its vocabulary from French, with influences from West African languages, as well as several European languages. It is closely related to Louisiana Creole and the creole from the Lesser Antilles.

French is the sole official language of all the overseas territories of France in the Caribbean that are collectively referred to as the French West Indies, namely Guadeloupe, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, and Martinique.

Other territories
French is the official language of both French Guiana on the South American continent, and of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, an archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland in North America.

Southeast Asia
French was the official language of the colony of French Indochina, comprising modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It continues to be an administrative language in Laos and Cambodia, although its influence has waned in recent decades. In colonial Vietnam, the elites primarily spoke French, while many servants who worked in French households spoke a French pidgin known as "Tây Bồi" (now extinct). After French rule ended, South Vietnam continued to use French in administration, education, and trade. However, since the Fall of Saigon and the opening of a unified Vietnam's economy, French has gradually been effectively displaced as the first foreign language of choice by English in Vietnam. Nevertheless, it continues to be taught as the other main foreign language in the Vietnamese educational system and is regarded as a cultural language. All three countries are full members of La Francophonie (OIF).

India
French was the official language of French India, consisting of the geographically separate enclaves referred to as Puducherry. It continued to be an official language of the territory even after its cession to India in 1956 until 1965. A small number of older locals still retain knowledge of the language, although it has now given way to Tamil and English.

Lebanon

A former French mandate, Lebanon designates Arabic as the sole official language, while a special law regulates cases when French can be publicly used. Article 11 of Lebanon's Constitution states that "Arabic is the official national language. A law determines the cases in which the French language is to be used". The French language in Lebanon is a widespread second language among the Lebanese people, and is taught in many schools along with Arabic and English. French is used on Lebanese pound banknotes, on road signs, on Lebanese license plates, and on official buildings (alongside Arabic).

Today, French and English are secondary languages of Lebanon, with about 40% of the population being Francophone and 40% Anglophone. The use of English is growing in the business and media environment. Out of about 900,000 students, about 500,000 are enrolled in Francophone schools, public or private, in which the teaching of mathematics and scientific subjects is provided in French. Actual usage of French varies depending on the region and social status. One-third of high school students educated in French go on to pursue higher education in English-speaking institutions. English is the language of business and communication, with French being an element of social distinction, chosen for its emotional value.

United Arab Emirates and Qatar
The UAE has the status in the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie as an observer state, and Qatar has the status in the organization as an associate state. However, in both countries, French is not spoken by almost any of the general population or migrant workers, but spoken by a small minority of those who invest in Francophone countries or have other financial or family ties. Their entrance as observer and associate states respectively into the organization was aided a good deal by their investments into the Organisation and France itself. A country's status as an observer state in the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie gives the country the right to send representatives to organization meetings and make formal requests to the organization but they do not have voting rights within the OIF. A country's status as an associate state also does not give a country voting abilities but associate states can discuss and review organization matters.

Oceania and Australasia
French is an official language of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, where 31% of the population was estimated to speak it in 2023. In the French special collectivity of New Caledonia, 97% of the population can speak, read and write French while in French Polynesia this figure is 95%, and in the French collectivity of Wallis and Futuna, it is 84%.

In French Polynesia and to a lesser extent Wallis and Futuna, where oral and written knowledge of the French language has become almost universal (95% and 84% respectively), French increasingly tends to displace the native Polynesian languages as the language most spoken at home. In French Polynesia, the percentage of the population who reported that French was the language they use the most at home rose from 67% at the 2007 census to 74% at the 2017 census. In Wallis and Futuna, the percentage of the population who reported that French was the language they use the most at home rose from 10% at the 2008 census to 13% at the 2018 census.

Future
The future of the French language is often discussed in the news. For example, in 2014, The New York Times documented an increase in the teaching of French in New York, especially in K-12 dual-language programs where Spanish and Mandarin are the only second-language options more popular than French. In a study published in March 2014 by Forbes, the investment bank Natixis said that French could become the world's most spoken language by 2050. It noted that French is spreading in areas where the population is rapidly increasing, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the European Union, French was the dominant language within all institutions until the 1990s. After several enlargements of the EU (1995, 2004), French significantly lost ground in favour of English, which is more widely spoken and taught in most EU countries. French currently remains one of the three working languages, or "procedural languages", of the EU, along with English and German. It is the second-most widely used language within EU institutions after English, but remains the preferred language of certain institutions or administrations such as the Court of Justice of the European Union, where it is the sole internal working language, or the Directorate-General for Agriculture. Since 2016, Brexit has rekindled discussions on whether or not French should again hold greater role within the institutions of the European Union.

Varieties

 * African French
 * Maghreb French (North African French)
 * Aostan French
 * Belgian French
 * Cambodian French
 * Canadian French
 * Acadian French
 * Newfoundland French
 * New England French
 * Ontario French
 * Quebec French
 * French French
 * Guianese French
 * Meridional French
 * Haitian French
 * Indian French
 * Jersey Legal French
 * Lao French
 * Louisiana French
 * Cajun French
 * Missouri French
 * South East Asian French
 * Swiss French
 * Vietnamese French
 * West Indian French

Current status and importance
A leading world language, French is taught in universities around the world, and is one of the world's most influential languages because of its wide use in the worlds of journalism, jurisprudence, education, and diplomacy. In diplomacy, French is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (and one of the UN Secretariat's only two working languages ), one of twenty official and three procedural languages of the European Union, an official language of NATO, the International Olympic Committee, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Organization of American States (alongside Spanish, Portuguese and English), the Eurovision Song Contest, one of eighteen official languages of the European Space Agency, World Trade Organization and the least used of the three official languages in the North American Free Trade Agreement countries. It is also a working language in nonprofit organisations such as the Red Cross (alongside English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian), Amnesty International (alongside 32 other languages of which English is the most used, followed by Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Italian), Médecins sans Frontières (used alongside English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic), and Médecins du Monde (used alongside English). Given the demographic prospects of the French-speaking nations of Africa, researcher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote in 2014 that French "could be the language of the future".

Significant as a judicial language, French is one of the official languages of such major international and regional courts, tribunals, and dispute-settlement bodies as the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, the Caribbean Court of Justice, the Court of Justice for the Economic Community of West African States, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea the International Criminal Court and the World Trade Organization Appellate Body. It is the sole internal working language of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and makes with English the European Court of Human Rights's two working languages.

In 1997, George Weber published, in Language Today, a comprehensive academic study entitled "The World's 10 most influential languages". In the article, Weber ranked French as, after English, the second-most influential language of the world, ahead of Spanish. His criteria were the numbers of native speakers, the number of secondary speakers (especially high for French among fellow world languages), the number of countries using the language and their respective populations, the economic power of the countries using the language, the number of major areas in which the language is used, and the linguistic prestige associated with the mastery of the language (Weber highlighted that French in particular enjoys considerable linguistic prestige). In a 2008 reassessment of his article, Weber concluded that his findings were still correct since "the situation among the top ten remains unchanged."

Knowledge of French is often considered to be a useful skill by business owners in the United Kingdom; a 2014 study found that 50% of British managers considered French to be a valuable asset for their business, thus ranking French as the most sought-after foreign language there, ahead of German (49%) and Spanish (44%). MIT economist Albert Saiz calculated a 2.3% premium for those who have French as a foreign language in the workplace.

In English-speaking Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, French is the first foreign language taught and in number of pupils is far ahead of other languages. In the United States, French is the second-most commonly taught foreign language in schools and universities, although well behind Spanish. In some areas of the country near French-speaking Quebec, however, it is the foreign language more commonly taught.

Phonology
Vowel phonemes in French Although there are many French regional accents, foreign learners normally use only one variety of the language.
 * There are a maximum of 17 vowels in French, not all of which are used in every dialect: plus the nasalized vowels  and . In France, the vowels,  and  are tending to be replaced by ,  and  in many people's speech, but the distinction of  and  is present in Meridional French. In Quebec and Belgian French, the vowels , ,  and  are present.
 * Voiced stops (i.e., ) are typically produced fully voiced throughout.
 * Voiceless stops (i.e., ) are unaspirated.
 * The velar nasal can occur in final position in borrowed (usually English) words: parking, camping, swing.
 * The palatal nasal, which is written ⟨gn⟩, can occur in word initial position (e.g., gnon), but it is most frequently found in intervocalic, onset position or word-finally (e.g., montagne).
 * French has three pairs of homorganic fricatives distinguished by voicing, i.e., labiodental, dental , and palato-alveolar . are dental, like the plosives  and the nasal.
 * French has one rhotic whose pronunciation varies considerably among speakers and phonetic contexts. In general, it is described as a voiced uvular fricative, as in , "wheel". Vowels are often lengthened before this segment. It can be reduced to an approximant, particularly in final position (e.g., fort), or reduced to zero in some word-final positions. For other speakers, a uvular trill is also common, and an apical trill  occurs in some dialects. The cluster /ʁw/ is generally pronounced as a labialised voiced uvular fricative [ʁʷ], such as in [ʁʷa] roi, "king", or [kʁʷaʁ] croire, "to believe".
 * Lateral and central approximants: The lateral approximant is unvelarised in both onset (lire) and coda position (il). In the onset, the central approximants, , and  each correspond to a high vowel, , , and  respectively. There are a few minimal pairs where the approximant and corresponding vowel contrast, but there are also many cases where they are in free variation. Contrasts between  and  occur in final position as in  ', "pay", vs.  ', "country".
 * The lateral approximant /l/ can be delateralised when word- or morpheme-final and preceded by /i/, such as in /tʁavaj/ travail, "work", or when a word ending in ⟨al⟩ is pluralised, giving ⟨aux⟩ /o/.

French pronunciation follows strict rules based on spelling, but French spelling is often based more on history than phonology. The rules for pronunciation vary between dialects, but the standard rules are:
 * Final single consonants, in particular s, x, z, t, d, n, p and g, are normally silent. (A consonant is considered "final" when no vowel follows it even if one or more consonants follow it.) The final letters f, k, q, and l, however, are normally pronounced. The final c is sometimes pronounced like in bac, sac, roc but can also be silent like in blanc or estomac. The final r is usually silent when it follows an e in a word of two or more syllables, but it is pronounced in some words (hiver, super, cancer etc.).
 * When the following word begins with a vowel, however, a silent consonant may once again be pronounced, to provide a liaison or "link" between the two words. Some liaisons are mandatory, for example the s in les amants or vous avez; some are optional, depending on dialect and register, for example, the first s in deux cents euros or euros irlandais; and some are forbidden, for example, the s in beaucoup d'hommes aiment. The t of et is never pronounced and the silent final consonant of a noun is only pronounced in the plural and in set phrases like pied-à-terre.
 * Doubling a final n and adding a silent e at the end of a word (e.g., chien → chienne) makes it clearly pronounced. Doubling a final l and adding a silent e (e.g., gentil → gentille) adds a [j] sound if the l is preceded by the letter i.
 * Some monosyllabic function words ending in a or e, such as je and que, drop their final vowel when placed before a word that begins with a vowel sound (thus avoiding a hiatus). The missing vowel is replaced by an apostrophe. (e.g., *je ai is instead pronounced and spelled → j'ai). This gives, for example, the same pronunciation for l'homme qu'il a vu ("the man whom he saw") and l'homme qui l'a vu ("the man who saw him"). However, for Belgian French the sentences are pronounced differently; in the first sentence the syllable break is as "qu'il-a", while the second breaks as "qui-l'a". It can also be noted that, in Quebec French, the second example (l'homme qui l'a vu) is more emphasized on l'a vu.

Alphabet
French is written with the 26 letters of the basic Latin script, with four diacritics appearing on vowels (circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis) and the cedilla appearing in "ç".

There are two ligatures, "œ" and "æ", but they are often replaced in contemporary French with "oe" and "ae", because the ligatures do not appear on the AZERTY keyboard layout used in French-speaking countries. However this is nonstandard in formal and literary texts.

Orthography
French spelling, like English spelling, tends to preserve obsolete pronunciation rules. This is mainly due to extreme phonetic changes since the Old French period, without a corresponding change in spelling. Moreover, some conscious changes were made to restore Latin orthography (as with some English words such as "debt"):
 * Old French doit > French doigt "finger" (Latin digitus)
 * Old French pie > French pied "foot" [Latin pes (stem: ped-)]

French orthography is morphophonemic. While it contains 130 graphemes that denote only 36 phonemes, many of its spelling rules are likely due to a consistency in morphemic patterns such as adding suffixes and prefixes. Many given spellings of common morphemes usually lead to a predictable sound. In particular, a given vowel combination or diacritic generally leads to one phoneme. However, there is not a one-to-one relation of a phoneme and a single related grapheme, which can be seen in how tomber and tombé both end with the /e/ phoneme. Additionally, there are many variations in the pronunciation of consonants at the end of words, demonstrated by how the x in paix is not pronounced though at the end of Aix it is.

As a result, it can be difficult to predict the spelling of a word based on the sound. Final consonants are generally silent, except when the following word begins with a vowel (see Liaison (French)). For example, the following words end in a vowel sound: pied, aller, les, finit, beaux. The same words followed by a vowel, however, may sound the consonants, as they do in these examples: beaux-arts, les amis, pied-à-terre.

French writing, as with any language, is affected by the spoken language. In Old French, the plural for animal was animals. The sequence was unstable and was turned into a diphthong. This change was then reflected in the orthography: animaus. The us ending, very common in Latin, was then abbreviated by copyists (monks) by the letter x, resulting in a written form animax. As the French language further evolved, the pronunciation of au turned into so that the u was reestablished in orthography for consistency, resulting in modern French animaux (pronounced first  before the final  was dropped in contemporary French). The same is true for cheval pluralized as chevaux and many others. In addition, castel pl. castels became château pl. châteaux.
 * Nasal: n and m. When n or m follows a vowel or diphthong, the n or m becomes silent and causes the preceding vowel to become nasalized (i.e., pronounced with the soft palate extended downward so as to allow part of the air to leave through the nostrils). Exceptions are when the n or m is doubled, or immediately followed by a vowel. The prefixes en- and em- are always nasalized. The rules are more complex than this but may vary between dialects.
 * Digraphs: French uses not only diacritics to specify its large range of vowel sounds and diphthongs, but also specific combinations of vowels, sometimes with following consonants, to show which sound is intended.
 * Gemination: Within words, double consonants are generally not pronounced as geminates in modern French (but geminates can be heard in the cinema or TV news from as recently as the 1970s, and in very refined elocution they may still occur). For example, illusion is pronounced and not . However, gemination does occur between words; for example, une info ("a news item" or "a piece of information") is pronounced, whereas une nympho ("a nymphomaniac") is pronounced.
 * Accents are used sometimes for pronunciation, sometimes to distinguish similar words, and sometimes based on etymology alone.
 * Accents that affect pronunciation
 * The acute accent (l'accent aigu) é (e.g., école—school) means that the vowel is pronounced instead of the default.
 * The grave accent (l'accent grave) è (e.g., élève—pupil) means that the vowel is pronounced instead of the default.
 * The circumflex (l'accent circonflexe) ê (e.g. forêt—forest) shows that an e is pronounced and that an ô is pronounced . In standard French, it also signifies a pronunciation of  for the letter â, but this differentiation is disappearing. In the mid-18th century, the circumflex was used in place of s after a vowel, where that letter s was not pronounced. Thus, forest became forêt, hospital became hôpital, and hostel became hôtel.
 * Diaeresis or tréma (ë, ï, ü, ÿ): over e, i, u or y, indicates that a vowel is to be pronounced separately from the preceding one: naïve, Noël.
 * The combination of e with diaeresis following o (Noël ) is nasalized in the regular way if followed by n (Samoëns )
 * The combination of e with diaeresis following a is either pronounced (Raphaël, Israël ) or not pronounced, leaving only the a (Staël ) and the a is nasalized in the regular way if aë is followed by n (Saint-Saëns )
 * A diaeresis on y only occurs in some proper names and in modern editions of old French texts. Some proper names in which ÿ appears include Aÿ (a commune in Marne, formerly Aÿ-Champagne), Rue des Cloÿs (an alley in Paris), Croÿ (family name and hotel on the Boulevard Raspail, Paris), Château du Faÿ (near Pontoise), Ghÿs (name of Flemish origin spelt Ghĳs where ĳ in handwriting looked like ÿ to French clerks), L'Haÿ-les-Roses (commune near Paris), Pierre Louÿs (author), Moÿ-de-l'Aisne (commune in Aisne and a family name), and Le Blanc de Nicolaÿ (an insurance company in eastern France).
 * The diaeresis on u appears in the Biblical proper names Archélaüs, Capharnaüm, Emmaüs, Ésaü, and Saül, as well as French names such as Haüy. Nevertheless, since the 1990 orthographic changes, the diaeresis in words containing guë (such as aiguë or ciguë) may be moved onto the u: aigüe, cigüe, and by analogy may be used in verbs such as j'argüe.
 * In addition, words coming from German retain their umlaut (ä, ö and ü) if applicable but use often French pronunciation, such as Kärcher (trademark of a pressure washer).
 * The cedilla (la cédille) ç (e.g., garçon—boy) means that the letter ç is pronounced in front of the back vowels a, o and u (c is otherwise  before a back vowel). C is always pronounced  in front of the front vowels e, i, and y, thus ç is never found in front of front vowels. This letter is used when a front vowel after ⟨c⟩, such as in France or placer, is replaced with a back vowel. To retain the pronunciation of the ⟨c⟩, it is given a cedilla, as in français or plaçons.
 * Accents with no pronunciation effect
 * The circumflex does not affect the pronunciation of the letters i or u, nor, in most dialects, a. It usually indicates that an s came after it long ago, as in île (from former isle, compare with English word "isle"). The explanation is that some words share the same orthography, so the circumflex is put here to mark the difference between the two words. For example, dites (you say) / dîtes (you said), or even du (of the) / dû (past participle for the verb devoir = must, have to, owe; in this case, the circumflex disappears in the plural and the feminine).
 * All other accents are used only to distinguish similar words, as in the case of distinguishing the adverbs là and où ("there", "where") from the article la ("the" feminine singular) and the conjunction ou ("or"), respectively.

Some proposals exist to simplify the existing writing system, but they still fail to gather interest.

In 1990, a reform accepted some changes to French orthography. At the time the proposed changes were considered to be suggestions. In 2016, schoolbooks in France began to use the newer recommended spellings, with instruction to teachers that both old and new spellings be deemed correct.

Grammar
French is a moderately inflected language. Nouns and most pronouns are inflected for number (singular or plural, though in most nouns the plural is pronounced the same as the singular even if spelled differently); adjectives, for number and gender (masculine or feminine) of their nouns; personal pronouns and a few other pronouns, for person, number, gender, and case; and verbs, for tense, aspect, mood, and the person and number of their subjects. Case is primarily marked using word order and prepositions, while certain verb features are marked using auxiliary verbs. According to the French lexicogrammatical system, French has a rank-scale hierarchy with clause as the top rank, which is followed by group rank, word rank, and morpheme rank. A French clause is made up of groups, groups are made up of words, and lastly, words are made up of morphemes.

French grammar shares several notable features with most other Romance languages, including
 * the loss of Latin declensions
 * the loss of the neuter gender
 * the development of grammatical articles from Latin demonstratives
 * the loss of certain Latin tenses and the creation of new tenses from auxiliaries.

Nouns
Every French noun is either masculine or feminine. Because French nouns are not inflected for gender, a noun's form cannot specify its gender. For nouns regarding the living, their grammatical genders often correspond to that which they refer to. For example, a male teacher is an enseignant while a female teacher is an enseignante. However, plural nouns that refer to a group that includes both masculine and feminine entities are always masculine. So a group of two male teachers would be enseignants. A group of two male teachers and two female teachers would still be enseignants. However, a group of two female teachers would be enseignantes. In many situations, including in the case of enseignant, both the singular and plural form of a noun are pronounced identically. The article used for singular nouns is different from that used for plural nouns and the article provides a distinguishing factor between the two in speech. For example, the singular le professeur or la professeure (the male or female teacher, professor) can be distinguished from the plural les professeur(e)s because le /lə/, la /la/, and les /le(s)/ are all pronounced differently. With enseignant, however, for both singular forms the le/la becomes l', and so the only difference in pronunciation is that the ⟨t⟩ on the end of masculine form is silent, whereas it is pronounced in the feminine. If the word was to be followed by a word starting with a vowel, then liaison would cause the ⟨t⟩ to be pronounced in both forms, resulting in identical pronunciation. There are also some situations where both the feminine and masculine form of a noun are the same and the article provides the only difference. For example, le dentiste refers to a male dentist while la dentiste refers to a female dentist. Furthermore, a few nouns' meanings depend on their gender. For example, un livre (masculine) refers to a book, while une livre a (feminine) is a pound.

Moods and tense-aspect forms
The French language consists of both finite and non-finite moods. The finite moods include the indicative mood (indicatif), the subjunctive mood (subjonctif), the imperative mood (impératif), and the conditional mood (conditionnel). The non-finite moods include the infinitive mood (infinitif), the present participle (participe présent), and the past participle (participe passé).

Indicative ( indicatif )
The indicative mood makes use of eight tense-aspect forms. These include the present (présent), the simple past (passé composé and passé simple), the past imperfective (imparfait), the pluperfect (plus-que-parfait), the simple future (futur simple), the future perfect (futur antérieur), and the past perfect (passé antérieur). Some forms are less commonly used today. In today's spoken French, the passé composé is used while the passé simple is reserved for formal situations or for literary purposes. Similarly, the plus-que-parfait is used for speaking rather than the older passé antérieur seen in literary works.

Within the indicative mood, the passé composé, plus-que-parfait, futur antérieur, and passé antérieur all use auxiliary verbs in their forms.

Subjunctive (subjonctif)
The subjunctive mood only includes four of the tense-aspect forms found in the indicative: present (présent), simple past (passé composé), past imperfective (imparfait), and pluperfect (plus-que-parfait).

Within the subjunctive mood, the passé composé and plus-que-parfait use auxiliary verbs in their forms.

Imperative (imperatif)
The imperative is used in the present tense (with the exception of a few instances where it is used in the perfect tense). The imperative is used to give commands to you (tu), we/us (nous), and plural you (vous).

Conditional (conditionnel)
The conditional makes use of the present (présent) and the past (passé).

The passé uses auxiliary verbs in its forms.

Voice
French uses both the active voice and the passive voice. The active voice is unmarked while the passive voice is formed by using a form of verb être ("to be") and the past participle.

Example of the active voice: Example of the passive voice: However, unless the subject of the sentence is specified, generally the pronoun on "one" is used:
 * "Elle aime le chien." She loves the dog.
 * "Marc a conduit la voiture." Marc drove the car.
 * "Le chien est aimé par elle." The dog is loved by her.
 * "La voiture a été conduite par Marc." The car was driven by Marc.
 * "On aime le chien." The dog is loved. (Literally "one loves the dog.")
 * "On conduit la voiture." The car is (being) driven. (Literally "one drives the car.")

Word order is subject–verb–object although a pronoun object precedes the verb. Some types of sentences allow for or require different word orders, in particular inversion of the subject and verb, as in "Parlez-vous français ?" when asking a question rather than "Vous parlez français ?" Both formulations are used, and carry a rising inflection on the last word. The literal English translations are "Do you speak French?" and "You speak French?", respectively. To avoid inversion while asking a question, "Est-ce que" (literally "is it that") may be placed at the beginning of the sentence. "Parlez-vous français ?" may become "Est-ce que vous parlez français ?" French also uses verb–object–subject (VOS) and object–subject–verb (OSV) word order. OSV word order is not used often and VOS is reserved for formal writings.

Vocabulary
The majority of French words derive from Vulgar Latin or were constructed from Latin or Greek roots. In many cases, a single etymological root appears in French in a "popular" or native form, inherited from Vulgar Latin, and a learned form, borrowed later from Classical Latin. The following pairs consist of a native noun and a learned adjective:
 * brother: frère / fraternel from Latin frater / fraternalis
 * finger: doigt / digital from Latin digitus / digitalis
 * faith: foi / fidèle from Latin fides / fidelis
 * eye: œil / oculaire from Latin oculus / ocularis

However, a historical tendency to Gallicise Latin roots can be identified, whereas English conversely leans towards a more direct incorporation of the Latin:
 * rayonnement / radiation from Latin radiatio
 * éteindre / extinguish from Latin exstinguere
 * noyau / nucleus from Latin nucleus
 * ensoleillement / insolation from Latin insolatio

There are also noun-noun and adjective-adjective pairs:
 * thing/cause: chose / cause from Latin causa
 * cold: froid / frigide from Latin frigidum

It can be difficult to identify the Latin source of native French words because in the evolution from Vulgar Latin, unstressed syllables were severely reduced and the remaining vowels and consonants underwent significant modifications.

More recently (1994) the linguistic policy (Toubon Law) of the French language academies of France and Quebec has been to provide French equivalents to (mainly English) imported words, either by using existing vocabulary, extending its meaning or deriving a new word according to French morphological rules. The result is often two (or more) co-existing terms for describing the same phenomenon.
 * mercatique / marketing
 * finance fantôme / shadow banking
 * bloc-notes / notepad
 * ailière / wingsuit
 * tiers-lieu / coworking

It is estimated that 12% (4,200) of common French words found in a typical dictionary such as the Petit Larousse or Micro-Robert Plus (35,000 words) are of foreign origin (where Greek and Latin learned words are not seen as foreign). About 25% (1,054) of these foreign words come from English and are fairly recent borrowings. The others are some 707 words from Italian, 550 from ancient Germanic languages, 481 from other Gallo-Romance languages, 215 from Arabic, 164 from German, 160 from Celtic languages, 159 from Spanish, 153 from Dutch, 112 from Persian and Sanskrit, 101 from Native American languages, 89 from other Asian languages, 56 from other Afro-Asiatic languages, 55 from Balto-Slavic languages, 10 from Basque and 144 (about 3%) from other languages.

One study analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin estimated that among the languages analyzed French has the greatest distance from Latin. Lexical similarity is 89% with Italian, 80% with Sardinian, 78% with Rhaeto-Romance, and 75% with Romanian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Numerals
The numeral system used in the majority of Francophone countries employs both decimal and vigesimal counting. After the use of unique names for the numbers 1–16, those from 17 to 69 are counted by tens, while twenty (vingt) is used as a base number in the names of numbers from 70 to 99. The French word for 80 is quatre-vingts, literally "four twenties", and the word for 75 is soixante-quinze, literally "sixty-fifteen". The vigesimal method of counting is analogous to the archaic English use of score, as in "fourscore and seven" (87), or "threescore and ten" (70).

Belgian, Swiss, and Aostan French as well as that used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, use different names for 70 and 90, namely septante and nonante. In Switzerland, depending on the local dialect, 80 can be quatre-vingts (Geneva, Neuchâtel, Jura) or huitante (Vaud, Valais, Fribourg). The Aosta Valley similarly uses huitante for 80. Conversely, Belgium and in its former African colonies use quatre-vingts for 80.

In Old French (during the Middle Ages), all numbers from 30 to 99 could be said in either base 10 or base 20, e.g. vint et doze (twenty and twelve) for 32, dous vinz et diz (two twenties and ten) for 50, uitante for 80, or nonante for 90.

The term octante was historically used in Switzerland for 80, but is now considered archaic.

French, like most European languages, uses a space to separate thousands. The comma (virgule) is used in French numbers as a decimal point, i.e. "2,5" instead of "2.5". In the case of currencies, the currency markers are substituted for decimal point, i.e. "5$7" for "5 dollars and 7 cents".

Example text
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in French:
 * Tous les êtres humains naissent libres et égaux en dignité et en droits. Ils sont doués de raison et de conscience et doivent agir les uns envers les autres dans un esprit de fraternité.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
 * All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Organisations

 * Fondation Alliance française: an international organisation for the promotion of French language and culture
 * Agence de promotion du FLE: Agency for promoting French as a foreign language

Courses and tutorials

 * Français interactif: interactive French program, University of Texas at Austin
 * Tex's French Grammar, University of Texas at Austin
 * Lingopolo French
 * French lessons in London, The Language machine

Online dictionaries

 * Oxford Dictionaries French Dictionary
 * Collins Online English↔French Dictionary
 * Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales: monolingual dictionaries (including the Trésor de la langue française), language corpora, etc.

Verbs

 * French verb conjugation at Verbix

Vocabulary

 * Swadesh list in English and French

Books

 * La langue française dans le monde 2010 (Full book freely accessible)

Articles

 * "The status of French in the world". French Ministry of Foreign Affairs

title: French language


text:
Formula fiction

In popular culture, formula fiction is literature in which the storylines and plots have been reused to the extent that the narratives are predictable. It is similar to genre fiction, which identifies a number of specific settings that are frequently reused. The label of formula fiction is used in literary criticism as a mild pejorative to imply lack of originality.

Varieties
The formula is defined specifically by predictable narrative structure. Formulaic tales incorporate plots that have been reused so often as to be easily recognizable. Perhaps the most clearly formulaic plots characterize the romantic comedy genre; in a book or film labeled as such, viewers already know its most basic central plot, including to some extent the ending. This does not always prove to be detrimental to a given work's reception however, as the popularity of the aforementioned genre demonstrates.

Formula fiction is often stereotypically associated with early pulp magazine markets, though some works published in that medium, such as "The Cold Equations", subvert the supposed expectations of the common narrative formula of that time.

Distinct from genre conventions
The formula is limited to structure of the plot itself. It does not include conventional, stereotypical elements of the genre used for the story background. Genres like high fantasy, westerns, and space opera (an adventure story in a science fiction setting) often have specific settings, such as a pseudo-Medieval European setting, the Old West, or outer space.

For any given genre, certain assumed background information covers the nature and purpose of predictable elements of the story, such as the appearance of dragons and wizards in high fantasy, warp drives and rayguns in science fiction, or shootouts at high noon in Westerns. These are taken as conventional in the genre and do not need to be explained anew to the reader, they may be included implicitly as part of the genre's formula, but they do not constitute the plot structure that makes a story formulaic.

Note however that stereotypical elements can also easily be treated subversively, to contradict some of the expectations inherent in the genre's formula.

Distinct from pastiche fiction
Formula fiction should not be confused with pastiche: Fiction mimicking another work or author's style. Comedy as a whole – including parody, satire, and subgenres such as romantic comedy – often relies on either formulaic elements, or mocking contradiction of such elements.

Though pastiche may naturally include formulaic elements, the same holds true of parody and satire. All may well include formulaic elements such as common stereotypes or caricatures, or which may use formulaic elements in order to mock them or point out their supposedly cliché or unrealistic natures.

title: Formula fiction