I have decided to examine the use of French in the world and in the United States. This research led me to a general analysis of French colonization and its effects on other countries.
APPLICATION:
I wish to use this as a pedagogical tool during my teaching career. As a French teacher, I will give my students a look into the culture of French speaking communities world wide and in their own country. I will also highten awareness of the diversity in this country in general by using maps to illustrate how many different languages that are represented in the United States.
PROCEDURE:
My research started off as an Internet search to find information on the French speaking world. I came across the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation (ACCT). Their homepage gave me information on the advancements of the French government and its global expansion in modern times. This also led me to the documents room at the University of Michigan in the Graduate Library. I used the countries listed in the atlas world database and information from The World Fact Book and the Encyclopedia to see which countries are listed as containing a French speaking population or have French as an official language. This brought me to the United States where I found out that the New England area and Louisiana both have bilingual schools which lists French as an official second language, bilingualism meaning equal efficiency in both French and English.
My next step is to look at each country that has French as its official language and explore the reasons surrounding this decision. This may take me into colonization where I will explore some of the socioeconomic factors that created a French speaking population in those countries. I also looked at the French colonies of the 17th century as well as the 19th century to see how the French empire has changed over the last 4centuries. This will also give me perspective on how the French language has grown and developed over the years.
OBSTACLES
My primary limitation was the exclusive use of only the countries listed in the Atlas World Data Base. This gave me sixty two countries and several regions in which to work with. Another problem I had were countries not listed in the CIA World Fact Book. This led me to the use of the Oxford Atlas of the world and several Encyclopedias in order to gather information on which countries spoke French. The fact that some of the reference books on French colonization was not really a problem. The next obstacle came when I began my maps. The colors on the screen did not match with those of the printed copy. This was overcome by the use of PhotoShop, where I saved the visual page from the atlas program on the geography layer, and pasted it into a new window in PhotoShop, saving it as a jpeg on the hard drive and then moving it to my home directory.
Some of the countries that I listed as having a French speaking population were termed in the CIA book as various immigrants who spoke their native indigenous language. I also included French patois, which is a dialect of French spoken locally, usually in rural traditional cultures, and Creole, which is a blending of two languages or more. I used Creole for the U.S. Virgin Isles because the encyclopedia stated that the mixture was between French and English, which meant that at some point there had to be a French influence in that region or at least on the people before they arrived there. The only other inference made to gather a good amount of data, was the small village in Italy that speaks French. I included all of Italy for the simple reason that it is not very big and this region would be hard to see, and that there are a lot of French people with Italian relatives and vice-versa; thus, you have a wide variety of people other than tourists and this small community, in Italy, who speak both French and Italian.
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