Baby's First Words in French - Book and CD - Newborn to 2 Years
Expand Your Child's Mind and Horizons with a Second Language!
Reccomended for babies and toddlers up to 2 years of age.
Brand New - Still shrinkwrapped
Before they focus in on their native language, babies have an amazing ability to hear and absorb sounds that adults unconsciously block out, like the subtleties of a foreign language. "Baby's First Words in French" is an introduction to the sounds of French and locks in a child's ability to learn these sounds.
Created by linguistic experts, "Baby's First Words in French" is designed for newborns to toddlers up to two years old. Each package includes:
-A CD of sweet and soothing songs, rhymes, words and stories
-Parents' guide that explains how children learn languages
-Lyric sheet so that parents can sing along to the songs on the CD with their children
Here's what a well-known expert has to say about Baby's First Words:
"it makes good science and good sense to teach your child an extra language in the early years when the brain centers for learning language are rapidly maturing." … Dr. William Sears, renowned pediatrician and co-author of The Baby Book.
About the French Language
French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 128 million people as first or second language, and by about an extra 72 million people with limited language skills, with significant speakers in 54 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France, where the language originated. Most of the rest live in Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Francophone Africa, Luxembourg, and Monaco.
French is a descendant of the Latin language of the Roman Empire, as are languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Romanian. Its development was also influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders.
It is an official language in 29 countries, most of which form what is called in French La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations. It is an official language of all United Nations agencies and a large number of international organizations. According to the European Union, 129 million (26% of the 497,198,740) people in 27 member states speak French, of which 59 million (12%) are native speakers and 69 million (14%) claim to speak it as a second language, which makes it the third most spoken second language in the Union, after English and German.
Per the Constitution of France, French has been the official language since 1992 (although previous legal texts have made it official since 1539, see ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts). France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education outside of specific cases (though these dispositions are often ignored) and legal contracts; advertisements must bear a translation of foreign words.
In addition to French, there are also a variety of regional languages. France has signed the European Charter for Regional Languages but has not ratified it since that would go against the 1958 Constitution.
In Belgium, French is the official language of Wallonia (excluding the East Cantons, which are German-speaking) and one of the two official languages —along with Dutch— of the Brussels-Capital Region where it is spoken by the majority of the population, though often not as their primary language. French and German are not official languages nor recognised minority languages in the Flemish Region, although along borders with the Walloon and Brussels-Capital regions, there are a dozen of municipalities with language facilities for French-speakers; a mirroring situation exists for the Walloon Region with respect to the Dutch and German languages. In total, native French-speakers make up about 40% of the country's population, the remaining 60% speak Dutch. Of the latter, 59% claim to speak French as a second language. French is thus known by an estimated 75% of all Belgians, either as a mother tongue, as second, or as third language.
A majority of the world's French-speaking population lives in Africa. According to the 2007 report by the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, an estimated 115 million African people spread across 31 francophone African countries can speak French either as a first or second language.
French is mostly a second language in Africa, but in some areas it has become a first language, such as in the region of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire and in Libreville, Gabon. It is impossible to speak of a single form of African French, but rather of diverse forms of African French which have developed due to the contact with many indigenous African languages.
In the territories of the Indian Ocean, the French language is often spoken alongside French-derived creole languages, the major exception being Madagascar. There, a Malayo-Polynesian language (Malagasy) is spoken alongside French. The French language has also met competition with English since English has been the official language in Mauritius and the Seychelles for a long time and has recently become an official language of Madagascar.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand due to the expansion of education and it is also there the language has evolved most in recent years. Some vernacular forms of French in Africa can be difficult to understand for French speakers from other countries[23] but written forms of the language are very closely related to those of the rest of the French-speaking world.
About 7 million Canadians are native French-speakers, of whom 6 million live in Quebec, and French is one of Canada's two official languages (the other being English). Various provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms deal with Canadians' right to access services in both languages, including the right to a publicly funded education in the minority language of each province, where numbers warrant in a given locality. By law, the federal government must operate and provide services in both English and French, proceedings of the Parliament of Canada must be translated into both these languages, and most products sold in Canada must have labeling in both languages.
Overall, about 13% of Canadians have knowledge of French only, while 18% have knowledge of both English and French. In contrast, over 82% of the population of Quebec speaks French natively, and almost 96% speak it as either their first or second language. It has been the sole official language of Quebec since 1974. The legal status of French was further strengthened with the 1977 adoption of the Charter of the French Language (popularly known as Bill 101), which guarantees that every person has a right to have the civil administration, the health and social services, corporations, and enterprises in Quebec communicate with him in French. While the Charter mandates that certain provincial government services, such as those relating to health and education, be offered to the English minority in its language, where numbers warrant, its primary purpose is to cement the role of French as the primary language used in the public sphere.
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