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. ///// (all pronounced ) and // (all pronounced ). This is conspicuous in verbs: (you speak), (I speak / one speaks) and (they speak) all sound like . Later attempts to respell some words in accordance with their Latin etymologies further increased the number of silent letters (e.g., vs. older – compare English "tense", which reflects the original spelling – and vs. older ).
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.
{| class="wikitable" !Letter !Name !Name (IPA) !Diacritics and ligatures |- | A || a || ||Àà, Ââ, Ææ |- | B || bé || || |- | C || cé || ||Çç |- | D || dé || || |- | E || e || ||Éé, Èè, Êê, Ëë |- | F || effe || || |- | G || gé || || |- | H || ache || || |- | I || i || ||Ïï, Îî |- | J || ji || || |- | K || ka || || |- | L || elle || || |- | M || emme || || |- | N || enne || || |- | O || o || ||Ôô, Œœ |- | P || pé || || |- | Q || qu || || |- | R || erre || || |- | S || esse || || |- | T || té || || |- | U || u || ||Ùù, Üü, Ûû |- | V || vé || || |- | W || doublevé || || |- | X || ixe || || |- | Y || igrec || ||Ÿÿ |- | Z || zède || || |} 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- (originally from Greek khilia "a thousand"), e.g. , , , .
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. ← . A grave accent over or is primarily used to distinguish homophones: ("to") vs. ("has"); ("or") vs. ("where"; is used only in this single word). A grave accent over indicates in positions where a plain would be pronounced (schwa). Many verb conjugations contain regular alternations between and ; for example, the accent mark in the present tense verb distinguishes the vowel's pronunciation from the schwa in the infinitive, . A circumflex over indicates , respectively, but the distinction between vs. is being lost in Parisian French, merging them as . In Belgian French, is pronounced . A circumflex over does not change their sound (except and ). Most often, it indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter (usually or a vowel): ←, ←, ←, ← (in medieval manuscripts many letters were often written as diacritical marks, e.g. the circumflex for and the tilde for ). It has also come to be used to distinguish homophones, e.g. ("of the") vs. (past participle of "to have to do something (pertaining to an act)"); however is in fact written thus because of a dropped : deu (see Circumflex in French). Since the 1990 orthographic changes, the circumflex on and can be dropped in most cases, e. g. becomes , becomes . However, it is retained: in forms of simple past and imperfect subjunctive; in proper names and their derivatives, e. g. , ; in a few cases it distinguishes words: (contraction of "of the") — (past participle of "to have to do something (pertaining to an act)"); "wall" — "mature"; "on", "sour" — "sure"; "young" — "fasting"; "I believe" — "I grow" (and several other forms of "to believe" and "to grow"). A diaeresis over indicates a hiatus between the accented vowel and the vowel preceding it, e.g. , . The diaeresis may also indicate a glide/diphthong, as in . The combination is pronounced in the regular way if followed by ( . An exception to this is ). 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. (commune in Marne, now ), (alley in the 18th arrondissement of Paris), (family name and hotel on the Boulevard Raspail, Paris), ? (near Joigny), ? (name of Flemish origin spelt where cursive looked like to French clerks), (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 (an insurance company in eastern France). The diaeresis on appears in the Biblical proper names ?, (with for as in words of Latin origin such as , or chemical element names such as ), , , and , as well as French names such as Haüy . Nevertheless, since the 1990 orthographic changes, the diaeresis in words containing (such as or ) can be moved onto the : , , and by analogy may be used in verbs such as . Without a diaeresis, the would be silent (or a schwa in accents which retain one): . In addition, words of German origin retain their umlaut () if applicable but often use French pronunciation, such as (, trademark of a pressure washer). A cedilla under indicates that it is pronounced rather than . Thus "I throw" (with for before ), "I was throwing" ( would represent before without the cedilla). The cedilla is only used before , e.g. . A cedilla is not used before , since they already mark the as , e.g. , , .
A tilde () above is occasionally used in French for words and names of Spanish origin that have been incorporated into the language (e.g., , ). 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 and the , deprecate the omission. 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 (e.g., , , but ). Nevertheless, diacritics are often ignored in word games, including crosswords, Scrabble, and .
Ligatures The ligatures and are part of French orthography. For collation, these ligatures are treated like the sequences and respectively.
Æ (, or ) is rare, appearing only in some words of Latin and Greek origin like , , , (as named dog’s parsley). It generally represents the vowel , like .
The sequence appears in loanwords where both sounds are heard, as in and .wikt:fr:Catégorie:ae non ligaturé en français
Π(, or ) is a mandatory contraction of in certain words. Some of these are native French words, with the pronunciation or , e.g. "choir" , "heart" , "moods (related to moral)" , "knot" , "sister" , "egg" , "work (of art)" , "vow" . It usually appears in the combination ; "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 / > Modern French .
is also used in words of Greek origin, as the Latin rendering of the Greek diphthong , e.g. "coelacanth". These words used to be pronounced with , but in recent years a spelling pronunciation with has taken hold, e.g. or , 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 and its derivatives.See wikt:fr:Catégorie:oe non ligaturé en français
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 in , in , or in . 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 ('he ate'), 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 (French) for details.
Consonants