It’s derived from Latin, but influenced by the Celtic, Gaelic, and Germanic Frankish languages. There are 8 tenses in the adjudicative mode of French, but two of them are not used in speech. It is the official language in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the state of Quebec in Canada, and as an official or auxiliary language in many former French and Belgian colonies i.e. Madagascar, Seychelles, Congo, Morocco, Cameroon, Haiti and the Ivory Coast. It is closely related to other Roman languages, i.e. Italian and Spanish.