A fascinating exploration of the historical and cultural development of the French language from the bestselling authors of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong .

Imagine a language that is watched over by a group of forty “Immortals,” a language with rules so complex that few people ever completely master it, whose status as the world’s lingua franca has been declining for two centuries, whose use in global institutions is waning and whose speakers are so insecure they pass laws banning the use of other languages and spend millions of tax-payers’ dollars to make sure it gets used in literature, music and film. Now imagine a language that is second only to English for the number of countries where it is spoken officially, surpassing both Spanish or Arabic, a language that is the official tongue of two G-7 countries and three European nations, that is employed alongside English in most international institutions and that is the number-two choice of language students across the planet – a language with two million teachers and 100 million students worldwide, and whose number of speakers has tripled in the last fifty years.

This paradox is the backdrop for The Story of French , in which bilingual Canadian authors Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow unravel the mysteries of a language that has maintained its global influence in spite of the ascendancy of English. Mixing historical analysis with journalistic observation, and drawing on their experiences living in and travelling to French-speaking countries, they explore how the French language developed over the centuries, how it came to be spoken in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and how it has maintained its global appeal.

From the Hardcover edition.

Jean-Benoît Nadeau was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and lives in Montreal. His first book in English is "Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong", which he co-signed with wife and coauthor Julie Barlow. He also published "The Story of French", "The Story of Spanish" and "The Bonjour Effect: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed". Their books have been translated in French, Dutch, Mandarin and Japanese.

In French, he authored "Les Français aussi ont un accent", "Pas si fous ces Français", "Le français quelle histoire!", "Les accents circomplexes", "Le Guide du travailleur autonome 3.0" and "Écrire pour vivre."

As a journalist, he is a columnist for Montreal daily Le Devoir, a contributor to Canada's leading national magazine L'actualité and an editorialist at Avenues.ca, and has signed op-eds in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

Julie Barlow was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1968. She moved to Montreal and began learning French in 1987, then started working as a French language journalist in 1996. She lived with her husband, author Jean-Benoît Nadeau, in Paris from 1999-2000 and wrote her first book, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong (2003), which went on to become an international bestseller. Her next book, The Story of French, won France's 2011 Prix la Renaissance. In 2013, after publishing The Story of Spanish, she returned to Paris with her husband and daughters to write her latest book, The Bonjour Effect (2016). She lives with her family in Montreal, where she works as a journalist, translator and writing instructor.