Getty Images Copyright: Getty Images French-Moroccan novellist Leïla Slimani will lead the campaign to internationalise French. Image caption: French-Moroccan novellist Leïla Slimani will lead the campaign to internationalise French.

France's President Emmanuel Macron has announced ambitious plans to extend the international influence of the French language, which he sees as key to boosting France's presence on the world stage.

French is the fifth-most spoken language globally, according to the International Organisation of La Francophonie, after Mandarin, English, Spanish and either Arabic or Hindi.

Africa is home to the world's biggest French-speaking population, with 31 of the continent's 54 nations having French as an official language - a legacy of French and Belgian colonial power.

In today's speech marking International Francophonie Day, President Macron quoted Burundian author Gaël Faye as saying the idea of the "francophonie" wasn't relevant to many young people, to whom it represented old portraits of French and African presidents.

President Macron appears to be on a mission to change that attitude.

He also called international French secondary schools the "backbone" of French teaching, saying he wants to double the number of students enrolled. Currently 350,000 pupils are taught at 500 such institutions internationally.

French-Moroccan novellist Leïla Slimani will lead the campaign to internationalise French.

But other francophone African writers are more sceptical.

Congolese author Alain Mabanckou, who is also a university professor in the US, reportedly turned down an invitation by Macron to be involved, saying France first needed to "prove" it had renounced colonialism.

News site The Local also reports that Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe and French-Djiboutian author and scholar Abdourahman Waberi have expressed similar concerns.