holiday rental france
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Sports and Hobbies
The most played sport in France is Pétanque. The leisured form of the sport of Pétanque is played by about 17 million people in France. The category Sport Competition of Pétanque is played by about 480,000 persons licenced with the Federation Française de Pétanque et Jeu Provençal (ffpjp). The ffpjp is the 4th sportive féderation in France. Licensed players play the very competitive form of Pétanque which is called Pétanque Sport, under precise rules.
The most-watched sports in France are football (soccer), basketball, rugby, cycling and tennis. France is notable for holding the football World Cup in 1998, for holding the annual cycling race Tour de France, and the tennis Grand Slam tournament Roland Garros, or the French Open. Sport is encouraged in school, and local sports clubs receive financial support from the local governments. While football is definitely the most popular, rugby takes dominance in the southwest, especially around the city of Toulouse.
Babyfoot (table football) is a very popular pastime in bars and in homes in France, and the French are the predominant winners of worldwide table football competitions.
Language
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.
Transportation
There are significant differences in lifestyles with respect to transportation between very urbanized regions such as Paris, and smaller towns and rural areas. In Paris, and to a lesser extent in other major cities, many households do not own an automobile and simply use efficient mass transportation.