African French

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You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (August 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,078 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Français d'Afrique]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Français d'Afrique}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

African French
français africain
A private pharmacy in Abidjan, Ivory Coast
Region	Africa
Speakers	L1: 1.2 million (2021)[1] L1 and L2: 320 million (2024)[2][3][4]
Language family	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Latin Romance Italo-Western Western Romance Gallo-Iberian Gallo-Romance Gallo-Rhaetian? Arpitan–Oïl Oïl French African French
Early forms	Old Latin Vulgar Latin Proto-Romance Old French Middle French
Dialects	West African French Maghreb French Djiboutian French Indian Ocean French Eastern African French
Writing system	Latin (French alphabet) French Braille
Official status
Official language in	Countries and territories  Benin  Burundi  Cameroon  Central African Republic  Chad  Comoros  Congo  Côte d'Ivoire  Djibouti  DR Congo  Equatorial Guinea  Gabon  Guinea  Madagascar  Mayotte  Réunion  Rwanda  Senegal  Seychelles  Togo
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
IETF	fr-002
Status of French in Africa in 2025

African French (French: français africain) is the umbrella grouping of varieties of the French language spoken throughout Francophone Africa. Used mainly as a secondary language or lingua franca, it is spoken by an estimated 320 million people across 34 countries and territories,^{[Note 1]} some of which are not Francophone, but merely members or observers of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Of these, 18 sovereign states recognize it as an official de jure language, though it is not the native tongue of the majority.^[2] According to Ethnologue, only 1,2 million people spoke it as a first language.^[1] African French speakers represent 67% of the Francophonie,^[3][4] making Africa the continent with the most French speakers in the world.

In Africa, French is often spoken as a second language alongside the Indigenous ones, but in a small number of urban areas (in particular in Central Africa and in the ports located on the Gulf of Guinea) it has become a first language, such as in the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast,^[5] the Democratic Republic of Congo,^[6] in the urban areas of Douala, Yaoundé in Cameroon, in Libreville, Gabon, and Antananarivo^[7].

In some countries, though not having official de jure status, it is a first language among a small social classes of the population, such as in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania, where French is a first language among the upper classes along with Arabic (many people in the upper classes are simultaneous bilinguals in Arabic/French), but only a second language among the general population.

In each of the Francophone African countries, French is spoken with local variations in pronunciation and vocabulary.

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