Métropole francophone des Amériques
Here’s La Presse on Métropole francophone des Amériques as a city slogan, with the new logo.
Quebec has also appointed four advisers to help save French online – including Louise Beaudoin.
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Kate
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Ephraim 16:30 on 2023-04-29 Permalink
Better slogan than… On est le 4ieme Metropole francophone
Kate 16:51 on 2023-04-29 Permalink
Port-au-Prince is in competition for French metropolis of the Americas, but I gather that although French is an official language there, almost everyone actually speaks Creole.
Ephraim 19:11 on 2023-04-29 Permalink
By population (not French speaking population), Paris isn’t even first…. it’s second. Montreal is 10th and Port-au-Prince is 15th. By French speaking population, Montreal is 4th and Port-au-Prince is 5th, but barely…. the 5th, through 8th all have about 2.4M: Port-au-Prince, Dakar, Doula, Yaoundé. Incidentally the next French city is 9th…. Lyon. And the next on the list in French is Marseille at 15th
Kate 08:59 on 2023-04-30 Permalink
The stats will always be a little wobbly because determining who can be said to speak a language is not black and white.
Chris 11:18 on 2023-04-30 Permalink
And the borders of cities are also blurry.
DeWolf 11:38 on 2023-04-30 Permalink
Many nominally francophone cities are not actually French-speaking on the ground. From the Wikipedia entry on Kinshasa, for example:
“Kinshasa is the largest officially Francophone city in the world, albeit that the vast majority of people either cannot speak French, or struggle in speaking it.”
But if we just take any metropolitan area whose official language is French, we get the following list:
1. Kinshasa – 17 million
2. Paris – 12.2 million
3. Abidjan – 6.3 million
4. Douala – 5.8 million
5. Montreal – 4.5 million
6. Dakar – 3.9 million
7. Yaoundé – 2.8 million
8. Port-au-Prince – 2.6 million
9. Lubumbashi – 2.6 million
10. Lyon – 2.3 million
Hopefully somebody here has been to some of the cities in West Africa and can share what the everyday linguistic situation is like.
Ephraim 15:12 on 2023-04-30 Permalink
@DeWolf – Kinshasa is about 12.8m French speaking, it’s about 75% to 80% French speaking. After this there is Ouagadougou, Bamako, Mbuji-Mayi, Antananarivo and then Marseille. And after that is Lomé, Brazzaville, Niamey, Toulouse, Kigali, Nice, and Goma.
It starts to get murky when you look at just French speakers, France is the largest, then DR Congo, Algeria, Morocco and then… Germany, Italy, Cameroon, the UK and finally Canada.
By percentage of French speakers, you have France, Monaco, Luxembourg, Belgium, Mauritius, Andorra, Switzerland, Gabon, Congo, Seychelles, Tunisia, DR Congo, Djibouti. Under 50% you start with Haiti. Canada is way down there with just over 28.5% Francophone.
DeWolf 17:58 on 2023-04-30 Permalink
Mauritius is a funny one. It was a British colony for 158 years, and a French colony for less than a century before that, and yet French remains the main language of business and media, even if English is the language of government. Of course, most people speak neither in their daily lives, they speak a creole language.
It all comes down to the flux of language. We see this here, where Montreal is very clearly a primarily francophone city in the way it works on a daily basis, but if you do funny things with statistics, you can come to the conclusion that less than 50% of Montrealers are francophone, simply because native French speakers are a minority.