French phonology

Vowels

Standard French contrasts up to 13 oral vowels and up to 4 nasal vowels. The schwa (in the center of the diagram next to this paragraph) is not necessarily a distinctive sound. Even though it often merges with one of the mid front rounded vowels, its patterning suggests that it is a separate phoneme (see the subsection Schwa below).

The table below primarily lists vowels in contemporary Parisian French, with vowels present only in other dialects in parentheses.

While some dialects feature a long distinct from and a distinction between an open front and an open back , Parisian French features only and just one open vowel realised as central . Some dialects also feature a rounded , which has merged with in Paris.

In Metropolitan French, while is phonologically distinct, its phonetic quality tends to coincide with either or .

Close vowels

In contrast with the mid vowels, there is no tense–lax contrast in close vowels. However, non-phonemic lax (near-close) appear in Quebec as allophones of when the vowel is both phonetically short (so not before ) and in a closed syllable, so that e.g. petite 'small (f.)' differs from petit 'small (m.)' not only in the presence of the final but also in the tenseness of the . Laxing always occurs in stressed closed syllables, but it is also found in other environments to various degrees.

In Metropolitan French, are consistently close , but the exact height of is somewhat debatable as it has been variously described as close and near-close .

Mid vowels

Although the mid vowels contrast in certain environments, there is a limited distributional overlap so they often appear in complementary distribution. Generally, close-mid vowels () are found in open syllables, and open-mid vowels () are found in closed syllables. However, there are minimal pairs:

• open-mid and close-mid contrast in final-position open syllables:

  allait ('was going'), vs. allé ('gone');

• likewise, open-mid and contrast with close-mid and mostly in closed monosyllables, such as these:

  jeune ('young'), vs. jeûne ('fast', verb),

  roc ('rock'), vs. rauque ('hoarse'),

  Rhodes ('Rhodes'), vs. rôde ('[I] lurk'),

  pomme ('apple'), vs. paume ('palm'),

  bonne ('good', feminine), vs. Beaune ('Beaune', the city).

Beyond the general rule, known as the loi de position among French phonologists, there are some exceptions. For instance, and are found in closed syllables ending in , and only is found in closed monosyllables before , , and .

The Parisian realization of has been variously described as central and centralized to before , in both cases becoming similar to .

The phonemic opposition of and has been lost in the southern half of France, where these two sounds are found only in complementary distribution. The phonemic oppositions of and and of and in terminal open syllables have been lost in almost all of France, but not in Belgium or in areas with an Arpitan substrate, where pot and peau are still opposed as and .

Open vowels

The phonemic contrast between front and back is sometimes no longer maintained in Parisian French, which leads some researchers to reject the idea of two distinct phonemes. However, the back is always maintained in Northern French, but only in final open syllables, avocat (lawyer) , but in final closed syllables, the phoneme is fronted to , but it is always long, pâte (pasta) . The distinction is still clearly maintained in many dialects such as Quebec French.

While there is much variation among speakers in France, a number of general tendencies can be observed. First of all, the distinction is most often preserved in word-final stressed syllables such as in these minimal pairs:

tache → ('stain'), vs. tâche → ('task')

patte → ('leg'), vs. pâte → ('paste, pastry')

rat → ('rat'), vs. ras → ('short')

There are certain environments that prefer one open vowel over the other. For example, is preferred after and before :

trois ('three'),

gaz ('gas').

The difference in quality is often reinforced by a difference in length (but the difference is contrastive in final closed syllables). The exact distribution of the two vowels varies greatly from speaker to speaker.

Back is much rarer in unstressed syllables, but it can be encountered in some common words:

château ('castle'),

passé ('past').

Morphologically complex words derived from words containing stressed do not retain it:

âgé → ('aged', from âge → )

rarissime → ('very rare', from rare → ).

Even in the final syllable of a word, back may become if the word in question loses its stress within the extended phonological context:

J'ai été au bois → ('I've been to the woods'),

J'ai été au bois de Vincennes → ('I've been to the Vincennes woods').

Nasal vowels

The phonetic qualities of the back nasal vowels differ from those of the corresponding oral vowels. The contrasting factor that distinguishes and is the extra lip rounding of the latter according to some linguists, and tongue height according to others. Speakers who produce both and distinguish them mainly through increased lip rounding of the former, but many speakers use only the latter phoneme, especially most speakers in northern France such as Paris (but not farther north, in Belgium).

In some dialects, particularly that of Europe, there is an attested tendency for nasal vowels to shift in a counterclockwise direction: tends to be more open and shifts toward the vowel space of (realised also as ), rises and rounds to (realised also as ) and shifts to or . Also, in some regions, there also is an opposite movement for for which it becomes more open like , resulting in a merger of Standard French and in this case. According to one source, the typical phonetic realization of the nasal vowels in Paris is for , for and for .

In Quebec French, two of the vowels shift in a different direction: → , more or less as in Europe, but → and → .

In the Provence and Occitanie regions, nasal vowels are often realized as oral vowels before a stop consonant, thus reviving the ⟨n⟩ otherwise lost in other accents: quarante → .

Contrary to the oral , there is no attested tendency for the nasal to become central in any accent.

Schwa

When phonetically realised, schwa (), also called e caduc ('dropped e') and e muet ('mute e'), is a mid-central vowel with some rounding. Many authors consider its value to be , while Geoff Lindsey suggests . Fagyal, Kibbee & Jenkins (2006) state, more specifically, that it merges with before high vowels and glides:

netteté → ('clarity'),

atelier → ('workshop'),

in phrase-final stressed position:

dis-le ! → ('say it'),

and that it merges with elsewhere. However, some speakers make a clear distinction, and it exhibits special phonological behavior that warrants considering it a distinct phoneme. Furthermore, the merger occurs mainly in the French of France; in Quebec, and are still distinguished.

The main characteristic of French schwa is its "instability": the fact that under certain conditions it has no phonetic realization.

• That is usually the case when it follows a single consonant in a medial syllable:

  appeler → ('to call'),

• It is occasionally mute in word-final position:

  porte → ('door').

• Word-final schwas are optionally pronounced if preceded by two or more consonants and followed by a consonant-initial word:

  une porte fermée → ('a closed door').

• In the future and conditional forms of -er verbs, however, the schwa is sometimes deleted even after two consonants:

  tu garderais → ('you would guard'),

  nous brusquerons [les choses] → ('we will precipitate [things]').

• On the other hand, it is pronounced word-internally when it follows more pronounced consonants that cannot be combined into a complex onset with the initial consonants of the next syllable:

  gredin → ('scoundrel'),

  sept petits → ('seven little ones').

In French versification, word-final schwa is always elided before another vowel and at the ends of verses. It is pronounced before a following consonant-initial word. For example, une grande femme fut ici, in ordinary speech, would in verse be pronounced , with the enunciated at the end of each word.

Schwa cannot normally be realised as a front vowel () in closed syllables. In such contexts in inflectional and derivational morphology, schwa usually alternates with the front vowel :

harceler → ('to harass'), with

il harcèle → ('[he] harasses').

A three-way alternation can be observed, in a few cases, for a number of speakers:

appeler → ('to call'),

j'appelle → ('I call'),

appellation → ('brand'), which can also be pronounced .

Cases of word-internal stable ⟨e⟩ are more subject to variation among speakers, but, for example, un rebelle ('a rebel') must be pronounced with a full vowel in contrast to un rebond → or ('a bounce').

Length

Except for the distinction still made by some speakers between and in rare minimal pairs like mettre ('to put') vs. maître ('teacher'), variation in vowel length is entirely allophonic. Vowels can be lengthened in closed, stressed syllables, under the following two conditions:

• , , , and the nasal vowels are lengthened before any consonant: pâte ('dough'), chante ('sings').
• All vowels are lengthened if followed by one of the voiced fricatives—, , , (not in combination with another consonant)—or by the cluster : mer/mère ('sea/mother'), crise ('crisis'), livre ('book'). However, words such as (ils) servent ('(they) serve') or tarte ('pie') are pronounced with short vowels since the appears in clusters other than .

When such syllables lose their stress, the lengthening effect may be absent. The vowel of saute is long in Regarde comme elle saute !, in which the word is phrase-final and therefore stressed, but not in Qu'est-ce qu'elle saute bien ! In accents wherein is distinguished from , however, it is still pronounced with a long vowel even in an unstressed position, as in fête in C'est une fête importante.

The following table presents the pronunciation of a representative sample of words in phrase-final (stressed) position:

Devoicing

In Parisian French, the close vowels and the mid front at the end of utterances can be devoiced. A devoiced vowel may be followed by a sound similar to the voiceless palatal fricative :

Merci. → ('Thank you.'),

Allez ! → ('Go!').

This phenomenon, interpreted variously as phrase-final vowel devoicing or phrase-final fricative epithesis, was first described by linguistic research in 1989 as the emergence of "sharp, phrase-final whistles". In informal writing on social media platforms, it can surface as a final -h or -ch. Sociolinguistic research suggests that it is observed across continental French, not just within Paris, and that it is correlated with intense emotion, and with a formal register for L2 speakers.

In Quebec French, close vowels are often devoiced when unstressed and surrounded by voiceless consonants:

université → ('university').

Though a more prominent feature of Quebec French, phrase-medial devoicing is also found in European French.

Elision

The final vowel (usually ) of a number of monosyllabic function words is elided in syntactic combinations with a following word that begins with a vowel. For example, compare the pronunciation of the unstressed subject pronoun, in je dors ('I am sleeping'), and in j'arrive ('I am arriving').

Glides and diphthongs

The glides , , and appear in syllable onsets immediately followed by a full vowel. In many cases, they alternate systematically with their vowel counterparts , , and such as in the following pairs of verb forms:

nie ; nier ('deny')

loue ; louer ('rent')

tue ; tuer ('kill')

The glides in the examples can be analyzed as the result of a glide formation process that turns an underlying high vowel into a glide when followed by another vowel: → .

This process is usually blocked after a complex onset of the form obstruent + liquid (a stop or a fricative followed by or ). For example, while the pair loue/louer shows an alternation between and , the same suffix added to cloue , a word with a complex onset, does not trigger the glide formation: clouer ('to nail'). Some sequences of glide + vowel can be found after obstruent-liquid onsets, however. The main examples are , as in pluie ('rain'), , as in proie ('prey'), and , as in groin ('snout'). They can be dealt with in different ways, as by adding appropriate contextual conditions to the glide formation rule or by assuming that the phonemic inventory of French includes underlying glides or rising diphthongs like and .

Glide formation normally does not occur across morpheme boundaries in compounds like semi-aride ('semi-arid'). However, in colloquial registers, si elle ('if she') can be pronounced just like ciel ('sky'), or tu as ('you have') like tua ('[(s)he] killed').

The glide can also occur in syllable coda position, after a vowel, as in soleil ('sun'), and often after , since tends to be realised as , like in Allemagne ("Germany") , instead of . There again, one can formulate a derivation from an underlying full vowel , but the analysis is not always adequate because of the existence of possible minimal pairs like pays ('country') / paye ('paycheck') and abbaye ('abbey') / abeille ('bee'). Schane (1968) proposes an abstract analysis deriving postvocalic from an underlying lateral by palatalization and glide conversion ( → → ).

Stress

Nature of stress in French

There has been variety of opinions in literature on the nature of stress in French. Perspectives range from French having lexical stress falling on the final full syllable (syllable with a vowel other than schwa) of a word to French having no lexical stress at all. A more nuanced view holds that French has stress that falls on the final full syllable of what has been variously termed a "stress group", "tone unit" or "phonological phrase", which has been considered to consist of either a "stressable" (typically content) word and any associated clitics (meaning words containing a schwa as the only vowel, such as ce, de, le, que, etc., can also be stressed) or a group of words linked by syntactic or semantic properties (reminiscent of prosodic stress). The latter perspective, along with the noted tonal quality of French stress, has given rise to the view that French stress and intonation largely overlap with each other.

In any case, it has always been agreed that word stress is not distinctive in French, so two words cannot be distinguished based on stress placement alone. Additionally, vowels keep their full quality in all syllables, regardless of whether the rhythm of the speaker is syllable-timed or mora-timed. (Mora-timed speech is frequent in French, especially in Canada, where it is very much the norm due to its phonemic long vowels.)

Emphatic stress

Emphatic stress is used to call attention to a specific element in a given context, such as to express a contrast or to reinforce the emotive content of a word. In French, this stress falls on the first consonant-initial syllable of the word in question. The characteristics associated with emphatic stress include increased amplitude and pitch of the vowel and gemination of the onset consonant, as mentioned above.

• C'est parfaitement vrai. ('It's perfectly true.'; no emphatic stress)
• C'est parfaitement vrai. (emphatic stress on parfaitement)

For words that begin with a vowel, emphatic stress falls on the first syllable that begins with a consonant or on the initial syllable with the insertion of a glottal stop or a liaison consonant.

• C'est épouvantable. ('It's terrible.'; emphatic stress on second syllable of épouvantable)
• C'est épouvantable ! (initial syllable with liaison consonant )
• C'est épouvantable ! (initial syllable with glottal stop insertion)

Emphatic stress may be associated with a pause between each syllable of the stressed word, which adds to emphasis.

Intonation

French intonation differs substantially from that of English. There are four primary patterns:

• The continuation pattern is a rise in pitch occurring in the last syllable of a rhythm group (typically a phrase).
• The finality pattern is a sharp fall in pitch occurring in the last syllable of a declarative statement.
• The yes/no intonation is a sharp rise in pitch occurring in the last syllable of a yes/no question.
• The information question intonation is a rapid fall-off from a high pitch on the first word of a non-yes/no question, often followed by a small rise in pitch on the last syllable of the question.