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 –1200 AD, and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years. Even in the late 17th century, with the publication of the first French dictionary by the Académie française, there were attempts to reform French orthography.
This has resulted in a complicated relationship between spelling and sound, especially for vowels; a multitude of silent letters; and many homophones, e.g. ///// and //. This is conspicuous in verbs: ', ' and all sound like. Later attempts to respell some words in accordance with their Latin etymologies further increased the number of silent letters.
Nevertheless, the rules governing French orthography allow for a reasonable degree of accuracy when pronouncing unfamiliar French words from their written forms. The reverse operation, producing written forms from pronunciation, is much more ambiguous. The French alphabet uses a number of diacritics, including the circumflex, diaeresis, acute, and grave accents, as well as ligatures. A system of braille has been developed for people who are visually impaired.
Alphabet
The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, with five diacritics and two orthographic ligatures.and are used only in loanwords and regional words. is usually written ; is usually written anywhere but before, before, and sometimes at the ends of words. However, is common in the metric prefix kilo-, e.g. kilogramme, kilomètre, kilowatt, kilohertz.
Diacritics
The diacritics used in French orthography are the acute accent, the grave accent, the circumflex, the diaeresis, and the cedilla. Diacritics have no effect on the primary alphabetical order.- An acute accent over represents. An in modern French is often used where a combination of and a consonant, usually, would have been used formerly, e.g. écouter < escouter.
- A grave accent over or is primarily used to distinguish homophones: à vs. a ; ou vs. où. A grave accent over indicates in positions where a plain would be pronounced . Many verb conjugations contain regular alternations between and ; 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 indicates, respectively, but the distinction between vs. is being lost in Parisian French, merging them as. In Belgian French, 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, e.g. du vs. dû ; however dû is in fact written thus because of a dropped : deu. Since the 1990 orthographic changes, the circumflex on and can be dropped unless it distinguishes homophones, e.g. chaîne becomes chaine but sûr does not change to avoid ambiguity with the word sur.
- A diaeresis over 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 is pronounced in the regular way if followed by .
- *The combination is either pronounced or ; it represents if it precedes .
- *A diaeresis on only occurs in some proper names and in modern editions of old French texts, e.g. Aÿ , Rue des Cloÿs , Croÿ , Château du Feÿ ?, Ghÿs ?, L'Haÿ-les-Roses , Pierre Louÿs , Eugène Ysaÿe , Moÿ-de-l'Aisne , and Le Blanc de Nicolaÿ .
- *The diaeresis on 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 can be moved onto the : aigüe, cigüe, and by analogy may be used in verbs such as j'argüe. Without a diaeresis, the would be silent : Aigues-Mortes.
- *In addition, words of German origin retain their umlaut if applicable but often use French pronunciation, such as Kärcher.
- A cedilla under indicates that it is pronounced rather than. Thus je lance "I throw", je lançais "I was throwing". The cedilla is only used before, e.g. ça. A cedilla is not used before, since they already mark the as, e.g. ce, ci, cycle.
Diacritics are often omitted on capital letters, mainly for technical reasons. However, many authorities, including the and the, reject this usage. The 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. Nevertheless, diacritics are often ignored in word games, including crosswords, Scrabble, and Des chiffres et des lettres.
Ligatures
The ligatures and are part of French orthography. For collation, these ligatures are treated like the sequences and respectively.Æ
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.
Œ
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 ; œil "eye" is an exception. Many of these words were originally written with the digraph ; the in the ligature represents a sometimes artificial attempt to imitate the Latin spelling: > Old French buef/beuf > Modern French bœuf.is also used in words of Greek origin, as the Latin rendering of the Greek diphthong, 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 is found after, the can be pronounced in some cases, or in others.
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.
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, e.g. the use of in téléphone, in 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, similar to the significance of a cedilla to.Spelling to sound correspondences
Some exceptions apply to the rules governing the pronunciation of word-final consonants. See Liaison for details.Consonants
Vowels
Vowels and consonants
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 normally represent, respectively, in Greek loanwords; 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 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. 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, took, little by little, over the other languages and evolved toward Classic French. These languages continued to evolve until Middle French emerged, in the 14th century to the 16th century.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 and was eliminated in favor of consistent, as both diphthongs had come to be pronounced or . However, many other distinctions that had become equally superfluous were maintained, e.g. between and soft or between and. It is likely that etymology was the guiding factor here: the distinctions and reflect corresponding distinctions in the spelling of the underlying Latin words, whereas no such distinction exists in the case of.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.