French orthography
French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language. It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100–1200 CE and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years. This has resulted in a complicated relationship between spelling and sound, especially for vowels; a multitude of silent letters; and many homophones, // ). Later attempts to respell some words in accordance with their Latin etymologies further increased the number of silent letters. Nevertheless, there are rules governing French orthography which allow for a reasonable degree of accuracy when pronouncing French words from their written forms. The reverse operation, producing written forms from a pronunciation, is much more ambiguous.
Alphabet
The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, with five diacritics and two orthographic ligatures.The letters and are rarely used except in loanwords and regional words. The phoneme sound is usually written ; the sound is usually written anywhere but before, before, and sometimes at the ends of words. However, is common in the metric prefix kilo- : kilogramme, kilomètre, kilowatt, kilohertz, etc.
Diacritics
The usual diacritics are the acute, the grave, the circumflex, the diaeresis, and the cedilla. Diacritics have no effect on the primary alphabetical order.- Acute accent or accent aigu : over e, indicates uniquely the sound. An é in modern French is often used where a combination of e and a consonant, usually s, would have been used formerly: écouter < escouter.
- Grave accent or accent grave : over a or u, used primarily to distinguish homophones: à vs. a, ou vs. où. Over an e, indicates the sound.
- Circumflex or accent circonflexe : over a, e and o, indicates the sound, and, respectively, but the distinction a vs. â tends to disappear in Parisian French, so they are both pronounced . In Belgian French, ê is pronounced. Most often, it indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter : château < castel, fête < feste, sûr < seur, dîner < disner. It has also come to be used to distinguish homophones: du vs. dû ; however dû is in fact written thus because of a dropped e: deu. Since the 1990 orthographic changes, the circumflex on most i
' s and u' s may be dropped when it does not serve to distinguish homophones: chaîne becomes chaine but sûr does not change because of sur. - Diaeresis or tréma : over e, i, u or y, indicates that a vowel is to be pronounced separately from the preceding one: naïve, Noël.
- *The combination of e with diaeresis following o is nasalized in the regular way if followed by n
- *The combination of e with diaeresis following a is either pronounced or not pronounced, leaving only the a and the a is nasalized in the regular way if aë is followed by n
- *A diaeresis on y only occurs in some proper names and in modern editions of old French texts. Some proper names in which ÿ appears include Aÿ , Rue des Cloÿs , Croÿ , Château du Feÿ ?, Ghÿs ?, L'Haÿ-les-Roses , Pierre Louÿs , Moÿ-de-l'Aisne , and Le Blanc de Nicolaÿ .
- *The diaeresis on u appears in the Biblical proper names Archélaüs ?, Capharnaüm , Emmaüs, Ésaü, and Saül, as well as French names such as Haüy. Nevertheless, since the 1990 orthographic changes, the diaeresis in words containing guë may be moved onto the u: aigüe, cigüe, and by analogy may be used in verbs such as j'argüe.
- *In addition, words coming from German retain their umlaut if applicable but often use French pronunciation, such as Kärcher.
- Cedilla or cédille : under c, indicates that it is pronounced rather than /k/. Thus je lance "I throw", je lançais "I was throwing". The cedilla is only used before the vowels a, o or u, for example, ça /sa/; it is never used before the vowels e, i, or y, since these three vowels always produce a soft /s/ sound.
Diacritics are often omitted on capital letters, mainly for technical reasons. It is widely believed that they are not required; however both the Académie française and the Office québécois de la langue française reject this usage and confirm that "in French, the accent has full orthographic value", except for acronyms but not for abbreviations. Nevertheless, diacritics are often ignored in word games, including crosswords, Scrabble, and Des chiffres et des lettres.
Ligatures
The two ligatures œ and æ have orthographic value. For determining alphabetical order, these ligatures are treated like the sequences oe and ae.Œ
This ligature is a mandatory contraction of in certain words. Some of these are native French words, with the pronunciation or, e.g., chœur "choir", cœur "heart", mœurs "moods ", nœud "knot", sœur "sister", œuf "egg", œuvre "work ", 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 the vowel, 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 the letter c, the c can be pronounced in some cases, or in others.
The ligature œ is not used when both letters contribute different sounds. For example, when is part of a prefix, or when is part of a suffix, or in the word moelle and its derivatives.
Æ
This ligature is rare, appearing only in some words of Latin and Greek origin like tænia, ex æquo, cæcum, æthuse. It generally represents the vowel, like.The sequence appears in loanwords where both sounds are heard, as in maestro and paella.
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 maintained in modern French, for example, the use of in words like téléphone, in words like théorème, or in chaotique. In the second case, a digraph is due to an archaic pronunciation, such as,,,, and, or is merely a convenient way to expand the twenty-six-letter alphabet to cover all relevant phonemes, as in,,,,, and. Some cases are a mixture of these or are used for purely pragmatic reasons, such as for in il mangeait, where the serves to indicate a "soft" inherent in the verb's root.Sound to spelling correspondences
Consonants and combinations of consonant letters
Vowels and combinations of vowel letters
Combinations of vowel and consonant letters
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,, and normally represent,, and in Greek loanwords, respectively; and the ligatures and in Greek loanwords represent the same vowel as . Further, many words in the international scientific vocabulary were constructed in French from Greek roots and have kept their digraphs.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 Gaulish language of the inhabitants of Gaul disappeared progressively over the course of Roman rule as the Latin languages began to replace it: written Latin and spoken Latin. Classical Latin, taught in schools, remained the language of religious services, of scientific works, of legislative acts and of certain literary works. Vulgar Latin, spoken by the Roman soldiers and merchants, and adopted by the natives, evolved slowly, taking the forms of different spoken Roman vernaculars according to the region of the country.Eventually the different forms of Vulgar Latin would evolve 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. With consolidation of royal power, beginning in the 13th century, the Francien vernacular, the langue d'oil variety in usage then on the Île-de-France, brought it little by little to the other languages and evolved toward Classic French.The languages found in the manuscripts dating from the 9th century to the 13th century form what is known as Old French or ancien français. These languages continued to evolve until, in the 14th century to the 16th century, Middle French emerged.
Middle French
During the Middle French period, 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 . 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, vingt and poids . The trend towards etymologizing sometimes produced absurd spellings such as sçapvoir for normal savoir, which attempted to combine Latin sapere with scire.
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 /s/ before a consonant, as in même, but sometimes from the coalescence of similar vowels, as in âge from earlier aage, eage. Prior to this, such words continued to be spelled historically. 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.
- 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, as well as the name of the language, from françois to français.
Modern French
- The uniting hyphen in all compound numerals
- The plural of compound words, the second element of which always takes the plural s
- The circumflex accent disappears on all u's and i's except for words in which it is needed for differentiation
- The past participle of laisser followed by an infinitive verb is invariable
"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, the exclamation mark, question mark, semicolon, colon, percentage mark, currency symbols, hash, and guillemet all require a non-breaking space before and after the punctuation mark. Outside of France, this rule is often ignored. 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 Western punctuation.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.
For instance, la place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad ;
and l’université Blaise-Pascal.
Likewise, Pas-de-Calais is actually a place on land; the real is le Strait of Dover.
However, this rule is not uniformly observed in official names, e.g., either la Côte-d'Ivoire or la Côte d'Ivoire, but normally 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.