By: Beau Livengood, Account Specialist.

I’m (probably?) biased because my name is Beau, but I believe French is the most beautiful language in the world. I find all the Romance languages pleasant-sounding, and I really fell in love with the French language and culture after studying there during college. Admittedly I’ve lost some of my speaking skills, but French Language Day (Journée internationale de la Francophonie) is March 20th and a perfect reason to try and recover my amour perdu. Whether you’re a native speaker, trying to polish up, or don’t know a word and want to impress the cute girl in French class, OverDrive can help with our vast catalog of excellent French content.

De Marque is one of our newest French distributors who has been adding content every week. Most of the titles are French-Canadian but they have European French as well, and you can find them by using the publisher account field in Marketplace. They have all kinds of titles ranging from juvenile picture books to travel guides, and, bien sûr, romance.

A few tips for finding French content:

  • Use the advanced search or language filter on the left-hand side of a search results page in Marketplace.
  • Finding dual language titles can involve a few different search strategies. Sometimes searching the phrases “English-French” or “French-English” is helpful, and sometimes it’s searching for the phrase “Bilingual.” Other times the language field will list both languages as an indication.
  • As always, your Account Manager is your best resource – just ask them!

Voulez-vous apprendre la plus belle langue? We have audiobooks by proven learning programs such as Pimsleur and Innovative Language Learning, and Le petit monde de Paul et Suzanne series contains some of my favorite Read-Alongs of all time. There are over 100 Paul et Suzanne titles across 4 different subseries, and these are perfect to help young ones (or anyone, really) develop French language skills.

To help you connect with those interested in French, we have a complete marketing kit on the Resource Center (towards the bottom under “LOTE Marketing Kits”) and can instantly translate all the menus, prompts and help resources on your site with a multilingual interface.

While Bastille Day is still several months away, French Language Day is a great opportunity to bring your French collection en avant et en vue!