French culture is profoundly allied with the French language. The artful use of the mother tongue, and its defense against perceived decline or corruption by foreign terms, is a major preoccupation for some persons and entities.

The Académie française sets an official standard of language purity; however, this standard, which is not mandatory, is even occasionally ignored by the government itself: for instance, the left-wing government of Lionel Jospin pushed for the feminization of the names of some functions (madame la ministre) while the Académie pushed for some more traditional madame le ministre.

Some action has been taken by the government in order to promote French culture and the French language. For instance, there exists a system of subsidies and preferential loans for supporting French cinema. The Toubon law, from the name of the conservative culture minister who promoted it, makes it mandatory to use French in advertisements directed to the general public. Note that contrary to some misconception sometimes found in the Anglophone media, the French government neither regulates the language used by private parties in non-commercial settings, neither makes it compulsory that France-based WWW sites should be in French.

France counts many regional languages, some of them being very unrelated to standard French such as Breton and Alsatian. Most of them are from the same language group (Indo-European languages), and some regional languages are Romance, like French, such as Provençal. Many of them have some enthusiastic proponents among the people; however, the real importance of local languages remains subject to debate. There is also a language completely unrelated to French, Basque. In April 2001, the Minister of Education, Jack Lang, admitted formally that for more than two centuries, the political powers of the French government had repressed regional languages, and announced that bilingual education would, for the first time, be recognized, and bilingual teachers recruited in French public schools. The real importance of local languages remains subject to debate.