PARIS, France — Research into français fondamental (‘Basic French’) began in France in 1947. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) took the initiative of setting up a linguistic committee to promote the spread of major languages of communication as one of the most effective means of spreading basic education around the world.
As part of their remit they declared that, by spreading the French language in a simplified form, they could effectively guarantee basic education for French-speaking peoples.
In 1959 the Centre de Recherche et d’Etude pour la Diffusion du français (CREDIF) was created, with Georges Gougenheim, professor of French literature at the Sorbonne, at its head. He later published his Dictionnaire fondamental de la langue française (‘Basic Dictionary of the French Language’), a list of some 3,000 words chosen according to the criteria of frequency, usefulness and daily experience. This was one of the foundation stones of français fondamental.
This limited and strictly contemporary vocabulary, allied to simple grammatical structures – in particular, short sentences and plentiful conjunctions – has created a level of French corresponding roughly equivalent to what a pupil is taught in the first three or four years of French primary school.
But throughout, français fondamental has been aimed primarily at people whose mother tongue is one other than French, or those who have learned to read only recently, but for whom French is nevertheless the normal language of communication.
Rather than a language in its own right, it is a level of language. It uses short sentences and is similar in some ways to spoken French. The words are contemporary, unambiguous as far as possible, concrete and exact. (WR 357/19 - 1/2.01) e-122