Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: How many letters are used in the French alphabet?
French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille convention, used by most braille alphabets around the world. However, only the 25 basic letters of the French alphabet plus "w" have become internationalized; the additional letters are largely restricted to French Braille and the alphabets of some neighboring European countries.
The letters "u" and "j", as distinct from "v" and "i", were introduced in the 16th century, and "w" assumed the status of an independent letter. The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century. Today, the English alphabet is now considered to consist of the following 26 letters:
The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an uppercase and a lowercase form, and the same letters constitute the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface (and font), and the shape of handwritten letters can differ significantly from the standard printed form (and between individuals), especially when written in cursive style.
English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis is used by some publishers in words such as "coöperation" or "naïve"). Written English does, however, have a number of digraphs.
The alphabet's current form originated from Latin script in about the 7th century. Since then, various letters have been added, or removed, to give the current Modern English alphabet of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form:
In addition to the three official languages, others are spoken in Belgium, like in Wallonia, where French became dominant only relatively recently. Sometimes seen as dialects, the varieties related to French have been recognized by the French Community as separate languages ("", ‘regional native languages’) since 1990, without, however, taking any further significant measures to support those varieties.
French is the sole official language of the Ivory Coast. In Abidjan, largest city of the country, 57.6% of the inhabitants over 15 can read and write French, and another 11% can speak it but not write it. The French language is seen as essential by a large majority, especially for dealing with the government and in education. Two thirds of respondents report feeling Francophone. French plays an important role in all areas of public and private life across the whole country. French is increasingly seen as an Ivorian language, and a local variety distinct from standard French has emerged ().
With more than 10 million inhabitants, Kinshasa is the second largest francophone city in the world after Paris. It is the capital of the most populous francophone country in the world, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an estimated 24 million people (40% of the total population) can speak French (essentially as a second language). Contrary to Abidjan where French is the first language of a large part of the population, in Kinshasa French is only a second language, and its status of "lingua franca" is shared with Lingala. Kinshasa French also differs from other African French variants, for it has some Belgian French influences, due to colonisation. People of different African mother tongues living in Kinshasa usually speak Lingala to communicate with each other in the street, but French is the language of businesses, administrations, schools, newspapers and televisions. French is also the predominant written language.
As at 1 January 2006, INSEE estimates that the number of foreigners living in metropolitan France amounted to 3.5 million people. Two out of five foreigners are from Portugal, Algeria or Morocco. Thus, EU nationals immigrating to France comprise 1.2 million people, and 1.1 million people are from the three Maghreb countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Immigrants are concentrated in Île-de-France, Rhone-Alpes, Provence and Côte d'Azur regions, accounting for 60% of the total immigrant population. Furthermore, there appears to be a lower rate of immigrants arriving from the EU since 1975 as opposed to an increase in African immigrants.
The letter Ʈ (minuscule: ʈ), called T with retroflex hook, is a letter of the Latin alphabet based on the letter t. It is used to represent a voiceless retroflex plosive in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and is used some alphabets of African languages. A ligature of ʈ with h was part of the Initial Teaching Alphabet to represent the voiceless dental fricative.
Like other European languages, English contains many words derived from Arabic, often through other European languages, especially Spanish. Among them is every-day vocabulary like "sugar" ("sukkar"), "cotton" ("quṭn") or "magazine" (""). More recognizable are words like "algebra" ("al-jabr"), "alcohol" ("al-kuhūl"), "alchemy" ("al-kimiya"), "alkali", "cypher" and "zenith" (see list of English words of Arabic origin).
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French language established itself permanently in the Americas. There is an academic debate about how fluent in French the colonists of New France were. While less than 15% of colonists (25% of the women – chiefly "filles du roi" – and 5% of the men) were from the region of Paris and presumably spoke French, most of the rest came from north-western and western regions of France where regular French was not the primary native language. It is not clearly known how many among those colonists understood French as a second language, and how many among them – who, in overwhelming majority, natively spoke an oïl language – could understand, and be understood by, those who speak French thanks to interlinguistic similarity. In any case, a linguistic unification of all the groups coming from France happened (either in France, on the ships, or in Canada) such that, according to many sources, the then "Canadiens" were all speaking French (King's French) natively by the end of the 17th century, well before the unification was complete in France. Canada's reputation was to speak as good French as Paris did. Today, French is the language of about 10 million people (not counting French-based creoles, which are also spoken by about 10 million people) in the Americas.
The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as roman square capitals. The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Throughout the ages, many dissimilar stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter.
After the evolution of the alphabet from the Western Greek Alphabet through Old Italic alphabet, G developed from C, the letter J developed from a flourished I, V and U split and the ligature of VV became W, the letter thorn Þ was introduced from the runic alphabet but was lost in all languages except Icelandic, and the letter s could be written either as a long s (ſ) inside a word or as a terminal s at the end or after a long s (ß) after the 7th century AD, but the long s was generally abandoned in the 19th century.
French is the dominant language in Quebec and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and is spoken in Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Louisiana. It is spoken alongside French-based creole languages in Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Barthélemy, and the French side of Saint Martin. French is one of the two official and national languages of Canada.
A French creole, or French-based creole language, is a creole language (contact language with native speakers) for which French is the "lexifier". Most often this lexifier is not modern French but rather a 17th-century koiné of French from Paris, the French Atlantic harbors, and the nascent French colonies. French-based creole languages are spoken natively by millions of people worldwide, primarily in the Americas and on archipelagos throughout the Indian Ocean. This article also contains information on French pidgin languages, contact languages that lack native speakers.
According to Michel Tribalat, a researcher at INED, there were 3.5 million people of Maghrebi origin (with at least one grandparent from Algeria, Morocco or Tunisia) living in France in 2005 corresponding to 5.8% of the total French metropolitan population (60.7 million in 2005). Maghrebis have settled mainly in the industrial regions in France, especially in the Paris region. Many famous French people like Edith Piaf, Isabelle Adjani, Arnaud Montebourg, Alain Bashung, Dany Boon and many others have Maghrebi ancestry.
The dialects of French spoken in Ontario are similar to, but distinct from, Quebec French and constitute part of the greater Canadian French dialect. Due to the large English majority in the province, English loanwords are sometimes used in the informal or slang registers of Franco-Ontarian French. While English loanwords occur to a large extent in many varieties of French in Canada and Europe, there has been more of a conscious effort in Quebec to eliminate anglicisms.
The numeral system employed, known as algorism, is positional decimal notation. Various symbol sets are used to represent numbers in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, potentially including both symbols that evolved from the Brahmi numerals, and symbols that developed independently. The symbols used to represent the system have split into various typographical variants since the Middle Ages:The evolution of the numerals in early Europe is shown here in a table created by the French scholar Jean-Étienne Montucla in his "Histoire de la Mathematique", which was published in 1757:
The Government of France consists of an executive branch (President of the Republic, Prime Minister, ministers, and their services and affiliated organizations), a legislative branch (both houses of Parliament), and a judicial branch. The judicial branch is, unlike for instance the federal judiciary of the United States under the Supreme Court, not organized into a single hierarchy (administrative courts fall under the Council of State, civil and criminal courts under the Court of Cassation), and some of its entities also have advisory functions. For historical reasons there has long been a hostility to having anything resembling a "Supreme Court"—that is, a powerful court able to quash legislation. Whether the Council is a court is a subject of academic discussion, but some scholars consider it the supreme court of France.
Group D
French is official, and there are 81 living indigenous languages, and two that are now extinct (Tonjon and Beti) . The Dioula dialect of Bambara is the most widely spoken one. Other language groups include the Gur languages, the Senufo languages, the Kru languages (including the Bété languages, Dida, Nyabwa, Wè, and Western Krahn), and the Kwa languages (Baoulé and Anyin are the most used).
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 4th-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, comprising 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 city of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, is also effectively bilingual, as it is on the other side of a river from Quebec, opposite the major city of Gatineau, and is required to offer governmental services in French as well as English.
The short-lived French Constitution of 1791 was the first written constitution in France, created after the collapse of the absolute monarchy of the Ancien Régime. One of the basic precepts of the revolution was adopting constitutionality and establishing popular sovereignty.
The basic Roman alphabet is used by about one hundred languages, with slight variations. Some versions contain as few as twenty-one characters, some as many as thirty. Letters have specific names associated with them, which may differ with language, dialect, and history. "Z", for example, is usually called "zed" in all English-speaking countries except the US, where it is named "zee". As elements of alphabets, letters have prescribed orders, although this too may vary by language. In Spanish, for instance, "ñ" is a separate letter, sorted after "n". In English, "n" and "ñ" are classified alike.
During the French Indochina, they introduced a Jarai alphabet using the Vietnamese alphabet at the beginning of the 20th century. With the introduction of the Bible in Jarai language, using that alphabet by Christian missionaries in Vietnam after the Vietnamese War, the Jarai increased their literacy and there are today many publications for the Vietnamese Jarai. There are 40 letters - 21 consonants + 19 vowels / 34 phonemes - 9 vowel phonemes + 25 consonant phonemes.
It encodes every "abstract" single letter of the basic Arabic alphabet, not every concrete visual form of isolated, initial, medial, final or ligatured letter shape variants (i.e. it encodes characters, not glyphs). The Arabic letters in the C0-FF range are in Arabic alphabetic order, but some Latin characters are interspersed among them. These are some Windows-1252 Latin characters used for French, since this European language has some historic relevance in former French colonies in North Africa such as Morocco and Algeria. This allowed French and Arabic text to be intermixed when using Windows 1256 without any need for code-page switching (however, upper-case letters with diacritics were not included).
The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant in "yoke", the vowel in "myth", the vowel in "funny", and the diphthong in "my". W always represents a consonant except in combination with a vowel letter, as in "growth", "raw", and "how", and in a few loanwords from Welsh, like "crwth" or "cwm".