French orthography

Diacritics

The diacritics used in French orthography are the acute accent (⟨◌́⟩; accent aigu), the grave accent (⟨◌̀⟩; accent grave), the circumflex (⟨◌̂⟩; accent circonflexe), the diaeresis (⟨◌̈⟩; tréma), and the cedilla (⟨◌̧⟩; cédille). Diacritics have no effect on the primary alphabetical order.

• An acute accent over ⟨e⟩ represents . An ⟨é⟩ in modern French is often used where a combination of ⟨e⟩ and a consonant, usually ⟨s⟩, would have been used formerly, e.g. écouter ← escouter.
• A grave accent over ⟨a⟩ or ⟨u⟩ is primarily used to distinguish homophones: à ("to") vs. a ("has"); ou ("or") vs. où ("where"; ⟨ù⟩ is used only in this single word). A grave accent over ⟨e⟩ indicates in positions where a plain ⟨e⟩ would be pronounced (schwa). Many verb conjugations contain regular alternations between ⟨è⟩ and ⟨e⟩; for example, the accent mark in the present tense verb lève distinguishes the vowel's pronunciation from the schwa in the infinitive, lever .
• A circumflex over ⟨a, e, o⟩ indicates , respectively, but the distinction between ⟨a⟩ vs. ⟨â⟩ is being lost in Parisian French, merging them as . In Belgian French, ⟨ê⟩ is pronounced . A circumflex over ⟨i, u⟩ does not change their sound (except jeune and jeûne ). Most often, it indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter (usually ⟨s⟩ or a vowel): château ←castel, fête ←feste, sûr ←seur, dîner ← disner (in medieval manuscripts many letters were often written as diacritical marks, e.g. the circumflex for ⟨/s/⟩ and the tilde for ⟨/n/⟩). It has also come to be used to distinguish homophones, e.g. du ("of the") vs. dû (past participle of devoir "to have to do something (pertaining to an act)"); however dû is in fact written thus because of a dropped ⟨e⟩: deu (see Circumflex in French).
  • Since the 1990 orthographic changes, the circumflex on ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ can be dropped in most cases, e. g. chaîne becomes chaine, flûte becomes flute. However, it is retained:
    • in forms of simple past and imperfect subjunctive;
    • in proper names and their derivatives, e. g. Nîmes, nîmois;
    • in a few cases it distinguishes words: du (contraction of de le "of the") — dû (past participle of devoir "to have to do something (pertaining to an act)"); mur "wall" — mûr "mature"; sur "on", "sour" — sûr "sure"; jeune "young" — jeûne "fasting"; je crois "I believe" — je croîs "I grow" (and several other forms of croire "to believe" and croître "to grow").
• A diaeresis over ⟨e, i, u, y⟩ indicates a hiatus between the accented vowel and the vowel preceding it, e.g. naïve , Noël . The diaeresis may also indicate a glide/diphthong, as in naïade .
  • The combination ⟨oë⟩ is pronounced in the regular way if followed by ⟨n⟩ (Samoëns . An exception to this is Citroën ).
  • The combination ⟨aë⟩ is either pronounced (Raphaël, Israël) or (Staël); it represents if it precedes ⟨n⟩ (Saint-Saëns ).
  • A diaeresis on ⟨y⟩ only occurs in some proper names and in modern editions of old French texts, e.g. Aÿ (commune in Marne, now Aÿ-Champagne), Rue des Cloÿs (alley in the 18th arrondissement of Paris), Croÿ (family name and hotel on the Boulevard Raspail, Paris), Château du Feÿ ? (near Joigny), Ghÿs ? (name of Flemish origin spelt ⟨Ghijs⟩ where cursive ⟨ij⟩ looked like ⟨ÿ⟩ to French clerks), L'Haÿ-les-Roses (commune between Paris and Orly airport), Pierre Louÿs (author), Eugène Ysaÿe (violinist/composer), Moÿ-de-l'Aisne (commune in Aisne and a family name), and Le Blanc de Nicolaÿ (an insurance company in eastern France).
  • The diaeresis on ⟨u⟩ appears in the Biblical proper names Archélaüs ?, Capharnaüm (with ⟨üm⟩ for as in words of Latin origin such as album, maximum, or chemical element names such as sodium, aluminium), Emmaüs , Ésaü , and Saül , as well as French names such as Haüy . Nevertheless, since the 1990 orthographic changes, the diaeresis in words containing ⟨guë⟩ (such as aiguë or ciguë ) can be moved onto the ⟨u⟩: aigüe, cigüe, and by analogy may be used in verbs such as j'argüe. Without a diaeresis, the ⟨ue⟩ would be silent (or a schwa in accents which retain one): Aigues-Mortes .
  • In addition, words of German origin retain their umlaut (⟨ä, ö, ü⟩) if applicable but often use French pronunciation, such as Kärcher (, trademark of a pressure washer).
• A cedilla under ⟨c⟩ indicates that it is pronounced rather than . Thus je lance "I throw" (with ⟨c⟩ for before ⟨e⟩), je lançais "I was throwing" (⟨c⟩ would represent before ⟨a⟩ without the cedilla). The cedilla is only used before ⟨a, o, u⟩, e.g. ça . A cedilla is not used before ⟨e, i, y⟩, since they already mark the ⟨c⟩ as , e.g. ce, ci, cycle.

A tilde (⟨◌̃⟩) above ⟨n⟩ is occasionally used in French for words and names of Spanish origin that have been incorporated into the language (e.g., El Niño, piñata). Like the other diacritics, the tilde has no impact on the primary alphabetical order.

Diacritics are often omitted on capital letters, mainly for technical reasons (not present on AZERTY keyboards). However, many authorities, including the Académie française and the Office québécois de la langue française, deprecate the omission. The Académie states that, because accents in French have full orthographic value and their absence can lead to misreading and mispronunciation, good typography must systematically use diacritics on capital letters. There is an exception for acronyms but not for abbreviations (e.g., CEE, ALENA, but É.-U.). Nevertheless, diacritics are often ignored in word games, including crosswords, Scrabble, and Des chiffres et des lettres.

Ligatures

The ligatures ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ are part of French orthography. For collation, these ligatures are treated like the sequences ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ respectively.

Æ

⟨æ⟩ (French: e dans l'a, a-e entrelacé or a, e collés/liés) is rare, appearing only in some words of Latin and Greek origin like tænia, ex æquo, cæcum, æthuse (as named dog’s parsley). It generally represents the vowel , like ⟨é⟩.

The sequence ⟨ae⟩ appears in loanwords where both sounds are heard, as in maestro and paella.

Œ

⟨œ⟩ (French: e dans l'o, o-e entrelacé or o et e collés/liés) is a mandatory contraction of ⟨oe⟩ in certain words. Some of these are native French words, with the pronunciation or , e.g. chœur "choir" , cœur "heart" , mœurs "moods (related to moral)" , nœud "knot" , sœur "sister" , œuf "egg" , œuvre "work (of art)" , vœu "vow" . It usually appears in the combination ⟨œu⟩; œil "eye" is an exception. Many of these words were originally written with the digraph ⟨eu⟩; the ⟨o⟩ in the ligature represents a sometimes artificial attempt to imitate the Latin spelling: Latin: bovem > Old French buef/beuf > Modern French bœuf.

⟨œ⟩ is also used in words of Greek origin, as the Latin rendering of the Greek diphthong ⟨οι⟩, e.g. cœlacanthe "coelacanth". These words used to be pronounced with , but in recent years a spelling pronunciation with has taken hold, e.g. œsophage or , Œdipe or etc. The pronunciation with is often seen to be more correct.

When ⟨œ⟩ is found after ⟨c⟩, the ⟨c⟩ can be pronounced in some cases (cœur), or in others (cœlacanthe).

⟨œ⟩ is not used when both letters contribute different sounds. For example, when ⟨o⟩ is part of a prefix (coexister), or when ⟨e⟩ is part of a suffix (minoen), or in the word moelle and its derivatives.

Digraphs and trigraphs

French digraphs and trigraphs have both historical and phonological origins. In the first case, it is a vestige of the spelling in the word's original language (usually Latin or Greek) maintained in modern French, e.g. the use of ⟨ph⟩ in téléphone, ⟨th⟩ in théorème, or ⟨ch⟩ in chaotique. In the second case, a digraph is due to an archaic pronunciation, such as ⟨eu⟩, ⟨au⟩, ⟨oi⟩, ⟨ai⟩, and ⟨œu⟩, or is merely a convenient way to expand the twenty-six-letter alphabet to cover all relevant phonemes, as in ⟨ch⟩, ⟨on⟩, ⟨an⟩, ⟨ou⟩, ⟨un⟩, and ⟨in⟩. Some cases are a mixture of these or are used for purely pragmatic reasons, such as ⟨ge⟩ for in il mangeait ('he ate'), where the ⟨e⟩ serves to indicate a "soft" ⟨g⟩ inherent in the verb's root, similar to the significance of a cedilla to ⟨c⟩.

Spelling to sound correspondences

Some exceptions apply to the rules governing the pronunciation of word-final consonants. See Liaison (French) for details.

Consonants

Vowels

Vowels and consonants

^1 These combinations are pronounced after ⟨a, e, eu, œ, ou, ue⟩, all but the last of which are pronounced normally and are not influenced by the ⟨i⟩. For example, in rail, ⟨a⟩ is pronounced ; in mouiller, ⟨ou⟩ is pronounced . ⟨ue⟩, however, which only occurs in such combinations after ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩, is pronounced as opposed to , e.g. orgueil , cueillir , accueil , etc. These combinations are never pronounced after ⟨o, u⟩, except -⟨uill⟩- (), e.g. aiguille , juillet , where the vowel + ⟨i⟩ + ⟨ll⟩ sequence is pronounced normally, although as usual, the pronunciation of ⟨u⟩ after ⟨g⟩ and ⟨q⟩ is somewhat unpredictable: poil, huile, équilibre but équilatéral , etc.

Words from Greek

The spelling of French words of Greek origin is complicated by a number of digraphs which originated in the Latin transcriptions. The digraphs ⟨ph, th, ch⟩ normally represent , respectively, in Greek loanwords; and the ligatures ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ in Greek loanwords represent the same vowel as ⟨é⟩ (). Further, many words in the international scientific vocabulary were constructed in French from Greek roots and have kept their digraphs (e.g. stratosphère, photographie).

History

The Oaths of Strasbourg from 842 is the earliest text written in the early form of French called Romance or Gallo-Romance.

Roman

The Celtic Gaulish language of the inhabitants of Gaul disappeared progressively over the course of Roman rule as the Latin language began to replace it. Vulgar Latin, a generally lower register of Classical Latin spoken by the Roman soldiers, merchants and even by patricians in quotidian speech, was adopted by the natives and evolved slowly, taking the forms of different spoken Roman vernaculars according to the region of the empire.

Eventually the different forms of Vulgar Latin in what is now France evolved into three branches in the Gallo-Romance language sub-family, the langues d'oïl north of the Loire, the langues d'oc in the south, and the Franco-Provençal languages in part of the east.

Old French

In the 9th century, the Romance vernaculars were already quite far from Latin. For example, to understand the Bible, written in Latin, footnotes were necessary. The languages found in the manuscripts dating from the 9th century to the 13th century form what is known as Old French (ancien français). With consolidation of royal power, beginning in the 13th century, the Francien vernacular, the langue d'oil variety then in usage in the Île-de-France (region around Paris), took, little by little, over the other languages and evolved toward Classic French. These languages continued to evolve until Middle French (moyen français) emerged, in the 14th century to the 16th century.

Middle French

During the Middle French period (c. 1300–1600), modern spelling practices were largely established. This happened especially during the 16th century, under the influence of printers. The overall trend was towards continuity with Old French spelling, although some changes were made under the influence of changed pronunciation habits; for example, the Old French distinction between the diphthongs ⟨eu⟩ and ⟨ue⟩ was eliminated in favor of consistent ⟨eu⟩, as both diphthongs had come to be pronounced or (depending on the surrounding sounds). However, many other distinctions that had become equally superfluous were maintained, e.g. between ⟨s⟩ and soft ⟨c⟩ or between ⟨ai⟩ and ⟨ei⟩. It is likely that etymology was the guiding factor here: the distinctions ⟨s/c⟩ and ⟨ai/ei⟩ reflect corresponding distinctions in the spelling of the underlying Latin words, whereas no such distinction exists in the case of ⟨eu/ue⟩.

This period also saw the development of some explicitly etymological spellings, e.g. temps ("time"), vingt ("twenty") and poids ("weight") (note that in many cases, the etymologizing was sloppy or occasionally completely incorrect; vingt reflects Latin viginti, with the ⟨g⟩ in the wrong place, and poids actually comes from Latin pensum, with no ⟨d⟩ at all; the spelling poids is due to an incorrect derivation from Latin pondus). The trend towards etymologizing sometimes produced absurd (and generally rejected) spellings such as sçapvoir for normal savoir ("to know"), which attempted to combine Latin sapere ("to be wise", the correct origin of savoir) with scire ("to know").

Classical French

Modern French spelling was codified in the late 17th century by the Académie française, based largely on previously established spelling conventions. Some reforms have occurred since then, but most have been fairly minor. The most significant changes have been:

• Adoption of ⟨j⟩ and ⟨v⟩ to represent consonants, in place of former ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩.
• Addition of a circumflex accent to reflect historical vowel length. During the Middle French period, a distinction developed between long and short vowels, with long vowels largely stemming from a lost before a consonant, as in même (cf. Spanish mismo), but sometimes from the coalescence of similar vowels, as in âge from earlier aage, eage (early Old French *edage < Vulgar Latin *aetaticum, cf. Spanish edad < aetate(m)). Prior to this, such words continued to be spelled historically (e.g. mesme and age). Ironically, by the time this convention was adopted in the 19th century, the former distinction between short and long vowels had largely disappeared in all but the most conservative pronunciations, with vowels automatically pronounced long or short depending on the phonological context (see French phonology).
• Use of ⟨ai⟩ in place of ⟨oi⟩ where pronounced rather than . The most significant effect of this was to change the spelling of all imperfect verbs (formerly spelled -⟨ois⟩, -⟨oit⟩, -⟨oient⟩ rather than -⟨ais⟩, -⟨ait⟩, -⟨aient⟩), as well as the name of the language, from françois to français.

Modern French

In October 1989, Michel Rocard, then-Prime Minister of France, established the High Council of the French Language (Conseil supérieur de la langue française) in Paris. He designated experts – among them linguists, representatives of the Académie française and lexicographers – to propose standardizing several points, a few of those points being:

• The uniting hyphen in all compound numerals

e.g. trente-et-un

• The plural of compound words, the second element of which always takes the plural s

e.g. un après-midi, des après-midis

• The circumflex ⟨ˆ⟩ disappears on ⟨u⟩ and ⟨i⟩ except for when it is needed to differentiate homophones

e.g. coût (cost) → cout, abîme (abyss) → abime but sûr (sure) because of sur (on)

• The past participle of laisser followed by an infinitive verb is invariable (now works the same way as the verb faire)

elle s'est laissée mourir → elle s'est laissé mourir

Quickly, the experts set to work. Their conclusions were submitted to Belgian and Québécois linguistic political organizations. They were likewise submitted to the Académie française, which endorsed them unanimously, saying: "Current orthography remains that of usage, and the 'recommendations' of the High Council of the French language only enter into play with words that may be written in a different manner without being considered as incorrect or as faults."

The changes were published in the Journal officiel de la République française in December 1990. At the time the proposed changes were considered to be suggestions. In 2016, schoolbooks in France began to use the newer recommended spellings, with instruction to teachers that both old and new spellings be deemed correct.

Punctuation

In France, Belgium, and Switzerland, the exclamation mark, question mark, semicolon, colon, percentage mark, currency symbols, hash, and guillemet all require a narrow no-break space between the punctuation mark and the material it adjoins. Computer software may aid or hinder the application of this rule, depending on the degree of localisation, as it is marked differently from most other Latin-script languages. This rule does not apply in Canadian French, where a space is inserted only before colons, brackets, and dashes and between guillemets and the quoted text.

Hyphens

The hyphen in French has a particular use in geographic names that is not found in English. Traditionally, the "specific" part of placenames, street names, and organization names are hyphenated (usually namesakes). For instance, la place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad (Square of the Battle of Stalingrad [la bataille de Stalingrad]); and l’université Blaise-Pascal (named after Blaise Pascal). Likewise, Pas-de-Calais is a French department; the eponymous pas (strait) is le pas de Calais.

This rule is not uniformly observed in official names, e.g., either la Côte-d'Ivoire or la Côte d'Ivoire, and usually la Côte d'Azur has no hyphens. The names of Montreal Metro stations are consistently hyphenated when suitable, but those of Paris Métro stations mostly ignore this rule. (For more examples, see Trait d'union.)