French medical interpreters
Real-time French medical interpretation for healthcare teams, on phones, tablets, and computers.
1.2 million people in the U.S. speak French at home.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Darker states have more French speakers; shading is logarithmic, relative to the state with the most speakers.
| State | Speakers |
|---|---|
| New York | 133,000 |
| Florida | 103,000 |
| Texas | 74,700 |
| Louisiana | 71,660 |
| Maryland | 58,640 |
| Massachusetts | 50,410 |
| New Jersey | 37,670 |
| Illinois | 36,290 |
| Pennsylvania | 36,260 |
| Georgia | 36,190 |
| Virginia | 34,400 |
| Maine | 33,580 |
| North Carolina | 30,900 |
| Ohio | 27,520 |
| Washington | 25,610 |
| Connecticut | 22,350 |
| Michigan | 21,100 |
| Colorado | 18,500 |
| Minnesota | 17,530 |
| New Hampshire | 16,960 |
| Arizona | 16,820 |
| Indiana | 12,940 |
| Missouri | 12,380 |
| Oregon | 12,290 |
| Tennessee | 10,690 |
| South Carolina | 10,450 |
| Kentucky | 9,672 |
| Rhode Island | 9,582 |
| Nevada | 8,480 |
| Vermont | 8,356 |
| Iowa | 8,086 |
| Wisconsin | 7,906 |
| Utah | 7,865 |
| District of Columbia | 7,779 |
| Alabama | 6,483 |
| Oklahoma | 5,230 |
| Nebraska | 5,134 |
| New Mexico | 4,014 |
| Kansas | 3,885 |
| Mississippi | 3,568 |
| Arkansas | 3,519 |
| Delaware | 3,314 |
| Idaho | 3,047 |
| West Virginia | 2,225 |
| Alaska | 2,115 |
| North Dakota | 2,039 |
| Montana | 1,880 |
| Wyoming | 1,139 |
| South Dakota | 955 |
The 10 states with the most French speakers
State counts reflect the 15 most reported non-English languages in each state’s ACS table. States where French falls outside the top 15 are shown without shading; the national total includes every state.
258,900
speakers of French speak English less than “very well”: the federal threshold for needing language assistance.
21%
of French speakers in the U.S. meet that limited-English definition.
133,000
people speak French at home in New York alone.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Meet Opalite.
Real-time AI medical interpretation in 150+ languages and dialects, connecting providers and patients in seconds.
- Works on the devices care teams already carry: phones, tablets, computers, and telehealth platforms
- Integrates with all EHRs
- Built for HIPAA-compliant healthcare
- SOC 2 Type II attested security controls
What to know when interpreting French
Every language has grammar that an interpreter must handle correctly. These are the French features that the fewest other languages in the world share, according to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS).
Indo-European · Romance · Eurasia
1.1%
of the world’s languages share this trait
French places “not” as a separate word after the verb and may add a second negative, so an interpreter must read the doubled form as one denial.
1.6%
of the world’s languages share this trait
French marks a noun’s role with short words that lean on the word after them rather than with endings, so an interpreter has to hear those small unstressed words to know who did what to whom.
1.7%
of the world’s languages share this trait
French marks how a speaker knows something with a verb ending also used for “must” or “might”, so an interpreter must separate “the patient reportedly has pain” from “the patient must have pain”.
How French is structured
- Word ordersubject, object and verb
- SVO
- Adpositionsprepositions or postpositions
- Prepositions
- Adjectivebefore or after the noun
- Noun-Adjective
- Demonstrativethis and that, before or after
- Demonstrative-Noun
- Numeralnumber before or after the noun
- Numeral-Noun
- Genitivepossessor before or after
- Noun-Genitive
- Relative clausebefore or after the noun
- Noun-Relative clause
- Morphologyprefixing or suffixing
- Strongly suffixing
- Tonewhether pitch changes meaning
- No tones
- Casesnumber of noun cases
- No morphological case-marking
- Gendersnumber of noun genders
- Two
- Classifierscounting words for nouns
- Absent
Source: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. WALS Online, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. French entry: wals.info FRE. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Values are reproduced as WALS codes them; each links to its datapoint. The clinical readings are Opalite’s own inferences and are not part of WALS.
FAQs about French medical interpreters
Three states hold 26% of the nation’s French speakers, and French ranks in the published top-15 language tables of 49 states.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
Opalite uses the same underlying interpretation techniques for French as it does for Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. In Opalite’s published validation study, those three languages were evaluated in clinical conversations, with over 90% fewer errors than certified medical interpreters across the conversations studied.
States where French is a top 15 non-English language
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
Try French medical interpretation.
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