How many people master French in the world? I need the information
broken down by country or region. I am not asking for the number of
native speakers nor the number of people who use French as their
primary language in everyday life, but the number of people who master
the language, i.e. who are able to understand, speak, read, write at
an advanced and fluent level.

Context: I am building a website to teach French, and rather than only
teaching the France variety of French, I want to devote some sections
to international French, depending on the numbers. For example if 10%
of French speakers in the world live in Black Africa or Quebec or
North Africa (Arabic background) or Haiti or Switzerland or Acadia or
Asia or whatever, then I will devote sections of my website to teach
the pronunciation and vocabulary that are proper to those regions. I
would eventually like to make a pie chart with the data obtained.
Don't hesitate to ask any questions, if my question is not clear.

Dear marraskuu,

Though all figures about the number of people speaking French
worldwide are the result of more or less well-founded esteems, there
seems to be a general tendency in the statistics available that
between 230 and 300 million individuals internationally have knowledge
of the French language.

According to the Rapport sur l'état de la Francophonie dans le monde,
Haut Conseil de la Francophonie, Paris 1999 (Report on the state of
French as a language in the world, by the High Counsil for
Francophonie, Paris 1999), there were the following numbers of people
speaking French internationally in 1997/98:

- 113 million Francophones who speak French as a native or adopted
language fluently and use it on a regular basis.

- 61 million "occasional" Francophones who live in a francophone
country but do not speak French regularly, due to limited knowledge.

- 100-110 million students of all ages who do not live in a
francophone country, but have learned or are learning French in order
to communicate with Francophones.

This would make a total of approximately 280 million people worldwide
with the ability of communicating using the French language.

French (with local variants) is an official language in the following
countries of the world:

Belgium (Note: Walloon is a dialect of the Langue d'Oïl which differs
signifcantly from Belgian French)
Benin 
Burkina Faso 
Burundi 
Cameroon 
Canada, especially Quebec (see Quebecois French) 
Central African Republic 
Chad 
Comoros 
Republic of the Congo 
Cote d'Ivoire 
Djibouti 
France (including Guadeloupe and Martinique) 
Gabon 
Guinea 
Haiti 
Luxembourg 
Madagascar 
Mali 
Monaco 
Niger 
Rwanda 
Senegal 
Seychelles 
Switzerland (Suisse Romande) 
Togo 
Vanuatu 
Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire)

French is also spoken in the following countries (although it's not an
official language):

Algeria 
Egypt 
India (Pondichery) 
Italy (Val d'Aoste) 
Laos 
Lebanon 
Mauritania 
Morocco 
Tunisia 
Vietnam

Source:

Wikipedia: French Language
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language

Source:
About.com: What is French? Facts and Figures about the French Language
http://french.about.com/library/bl-whatisfrench.htm

For the following countries, a percentage of French-speaking
inhabitants is known or estimated:

Belgium: 32%
Canada: 23.2%
France: 100%
Guadeloupe: 99%
Switzerland: 19.2%

Source:

CIA World Factbook 2001 - Languages
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/languages.html

Search terms used:
languages "speak french" million:
://www.google.de/search?q=languages+%22speak+french%22+million&hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&start=40&sa=N
"people speak french" world million:
://www.google.de/search?hl=de&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&q=%22people+speak+french%22+world+million&meta=

Hope this answers your question
Regards,
Scriptor

According to the Ethnologue report there are 77M first language
speakers and 128M second.

You can find a breakdown at
http://french.about.com/gi/dynamic/zoffsitetopad.htm?site=http://www.ethnologue.com&REF=http%3a%2f%2ffrench%2eabout%2ecom%2flibrary%2fbl%2dwhatisfrench%2ehtm

Apparently there are even 14000 in England!

Hope that this helps.

Blakkandekka's link didn't work in my browser. You can go directly to
the relevant page at ethnologue here

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=FRN

They have most of the stats you want, but some of them are ten to
twenty years out of date so I didn't want to compile them into a full
answer for you.

Willie

Thanks Willie.  The moral I think is 'always check before you paste'.