The Protection of Both the French Language All Over the World and Minority Languages in France: Policy and Institutions

Abstract

Nowadays, approximately 300 million people (Beck et al., 2018) in all five continents speak French. In this paper we analyse the current ways in which this language is expanded and preserved, keeping in mind that French coexists within hypercentral, supercentral, central and peripheral languages, some of them in danger of extinction. Francophonie and diversity walk together. We study the case of France and what the future of its linguistic wealth is, both from a linguistic and from a political perspective: protection or extinction?