The French Alphabet

French has 26 letters, the same 26 you already know from English. The difficulty is not the alphabet itself; it is the layer of diacritics, ligatures, silent finals, and liaison rules sitting on top of it. A fair number of letters you see on a page of French are not pronounced at all.

This page covers the 26 letters with their French names and sounds, the five diacritics (acute, grave, circumflex, diaeresis, cedilla), the two ligatures, the silent-letter problem, liaison, and the small set of sounds an English speaker has to build from scratch. A deeper pronunciation guide for the nasal vowels and the uvular r lives at the French pronunciation page.

The 26 letters

That is the canonical 26, identical in count to the English alphabet but considerably less honest about its intentions. The Académie française does not formally publish the alphabet the way the Real Academia does for Spanish, but the names above are what French primary schools teach and what people use to spell words aloud over the phone.

The diacritics

French has five diacritics. They are not optional flourishes; they are part of the spelling and change meaning, pronunciation, or both.

Acute accent (accent aigu): é

Only ever appears on the letter e. Turns it into a closed "ay"-ish sound, closer to the e in English "café" than to "day". Examples: été (summer), café, école (school), général. The acute is the most common French accent and the one English speakers spot first because it survives in borrowed words.

Grave accent (accent grave): à, è, ù

Appears on a, e, and u.

• On è, it changes the vowel to an open "eh" (the e in English "bed"). Père, mère, frère, très.
• On à and ù, it does not change the sound. It exists purely to distinguish homophones: a (has) vs à (to, at); ou (or) vs où (where).

Circumflex (accent circonflexe): â, ê, î, ô, û

Can appear on any vowel. Historically marks where an s used to be in Old French and has since been lost, so the English cognate often still has the s: forêt (forest), hôpital (hospital), château (castle), île (island), pâte (paste, pasta), goût (taste), arrêt (arrest, stop).

On a and o it slightly lengthens or rounds the vowel; on e it opens it (similar to è); on i and u it usually changes nothing audible. The Académie française made it optional on i and u in 1990 except where it distinguishes meaning (sûr "sure" vs sur "on", dû vs du). Most adult writing still uses it everywhere.

Diaeresis / tréma: ë, ï, ü, ÿ

The two dots. They mean "pronounce this vowel separately from the one next to it". Without the tréma, two adjacent vowels would form a single sound; the tréma forces them apart.

• Noël is "no-EL", two syllables, not "nole".
• naïf is "na-EEF", not "nayf".
• maïs (corn) is "ma-EES", distinguished from mais (but) which is "may".

The tréma on ü and ÿ is rare and almost entirely confined to proper nouns. For everyday French you will see ë and ï and that is essentially it.

Cedilla (cédille): ç

The hook under the c. Only ever on the letter c, only before a, o, or u. Its single job is to keep the c soft (an "s" sound) where it would otherwise be hard.

• français needs the cedilla; without it, "francais" would be read "fran-kay".
• garçon, leçon, reçu, ça, commerçant.

Never before e, i, or y (the c is already soft there). Never on k or g. The cedilla is c-only, and there is more on the underlying rule below.

Ligatures: œ and æ

Strictly not diacritics but bound letterforms. They behave like single letters.

• œ is the workhorse. Appears in cœur (heart), sœur (sister), œuf (egg), œuvre (work), bœuf (beef), nœud (knot), vœu (wish), and œil (eye). Pronounced "uh" or "eu" depending on the surrounding letters.
• æ is rare, almost entirely confined to Latin borrowings: et cætera, curriculum vitæ, ex æquo. Pronounced "ay" or "eh".

These are real letters and should not be typed as "oe" or "ae" in proper writing. Writing "coeur" in a French school essay will lose you a half mark. Typing them: Alt + 0156 (œ) on Windows with a numeric keypad; Option + q on Mac. A different unbound "oe" sequence exists (coexister, moelle), pronounced as two separate vowels.

The silent letter problem

The hardest thing about reading French aloud is that many letters on the page are not pronounced. The rule of thumb: final consonants are usually silent; final -e is usually silent; final -es and -ent (on verbs) are usually silent.

• petit is "puh-TEE".
• gros is "GROH".
• chaud is "SHOH".
• table is "TABL", with the final e barely there.
• ils parlent is "eel PARL"; the -ent ending is silent.

The mnemonic French children learn is CaReFuL: the consonants c, r, f, l are the ones that often are pronounced at the end of a word (sac, mer, chef, mal). Everything else (d, s, t, x, z, p, g, m, n) is usually silent.

Liaison

Liaison undoes half of that. When a word ending in a silent consonant is followed by one starting with a vowel sound, the silent consonant comes back and binds to the next word.

• les amis is "lay-zah-MEE" (the silent s of les is pronounced as a z).
• un homme is "uhn-NOM".
• petit ami is "puh-tee-tah-MEE".
• vous avez is "voo-zah-VAY".

Liaison is required after articles and between subject pronouns and verbs, forbidden after a singular noun, before an h aspiré, or after the conjunction et. There is a separate page on liaison that walks through each case.

The cedilla rule

French inherited from Latin the rule that c is hard before a/o/u and soft before e/i/y. When you want a soft c before a/o/u, you add the cedilla.

• commencer (to begin): no cedilla, because the c is followed by e.
• commençons (we begin): cedilla, because the c is now followed by o and you want to keep the soft "s" sound.
• français: cedilla, because you want "fran-SAY", not "fran-KAY".

K is always hard regardless of vowel; g uses a different mechanism (adding a silent e, as in mangeons) to stay soft before a back vowel. The cedilla is c-only.

The u sound

The French u is the vowel English speakers wrestle with for years. It is not "oo" (that is the French ou, as in vous or nous). It is the sound you make by shaping your mouth to say "ee" and then rounding your lips as if to whistle.

• tu (you, informal) is not "too". It is "tew" with rounded lips.
• lune (moon) is not "loon". It is "lewn" with rounded lips.
• rue (street) is not "roo". It is "rew" with rounded lips.

The default English error is to substitute "oo" (the French ou), producing a different word every time. Dessus (above) and dessous (below) are antonyms separated only by the u / ou distinction, and getting it wrong reverses your meaning. Drilling the u / ou contrast until automatic is the highest-leverage pronunciation exercise an adult French learner can do.

Nasal vowels

French has a set of vowel sounds where the vowel is pronounced through the nose and the following m or n is not pronounced as a consonant. The four classical ones:

• an / en / am / em: roughly the vowel in "aunt" said through the nose. Sans, dans, temps, vent.
• in / im / ain / aim / ein: a more open nasal vowel. Vin, pain, plein, faim.
• on / om: the rounded nasal. Bon, son, nom, tombe.
• un / um: historically separate, increasingly merged with in in modern Parisian French. Un, brun, parfum.

The m or n is part of the vowel only if it is not followed by another vowel or a doubled mn. Bon has a nasal vowel; bonne does not, because the second n unblocks it. An is nasal; âne (donkey) is not. Fuller treatment lives on the French pronunciation page.

K and W

French historically had no k or w in native vocabulary. Both letters exist in the modern alphabet only for loanwords, and even then they are uncommon.

• K in kilo, karaté, kiwi, koala, kayak. Most have direct English cognates.
• W in wagon (railway carriage), week-end, western, wifi, whisky. Pronunciation varies: wagon is "va-GON" (w as v); week-end is "wee-KEND" (w as w). The Académie française has pushed fin de semaine as a replacement and been largely ignored outside Quebec.

The H: muet and aspiré

French h is silent. Hôtel is "oh-TEL"; homme is "OM"; histoire is "ees-TWAR". But there are two flavours of silent h, and they behave differently for liaison and elision:

• H muet ("mute h") behaves as if the h were not there. The word starts with a vowel for liaison and elision. L'homme, not "le homme". Les hommes: "lay-zom".
• H aspiré ("aspirated h", a misleading name because nothing is aspirated) blocks liaison and elision. The word behaves as if it started with a consonant. Le hibou (the owl), not "l'hibou". Les haricots with no liaison: "lay ah-ree-KO", not "lay-zah-ree-KO".

Which kind a word has is determined by etymology: Latin-origin words tend to have h muet (homme, heure, hôtel, histoire); Germanic and Frankish words tend to have h aspiré (haricot, hibou, honte, héros). The spelling does not tell you. Dictionaries mark h aspiré with an asterisk. You learn each word individually.

Stress

French essentially has no word stress in the sense English does. English distinguishes RE-cord (noun) from re-CORD (verb); French does not. The rhythm falls on the phrase, not the word, and the stress (such as it is) lands on the last syllable of the phrase. In je vais au cinéma, the slight stress is on the final -MA. Within the phrase, each syllable is roughly equal in length, which is why French sounds "flat" to English ears and English-accented French sounds choppy to French ears.

This is the opposite of Spanish, where every word has a clear stressed syllable. In French, do not look for "the stressed syllable" of a word in isolation; the stress lives at the phrase level. Keep each syllable roughly the same length when you read aloud and let the last syllable of the phrase carry slightly more weight. That alone is half the battle on a French accent.

What an English speaker already has

Most letters of the French alphabet make sounds an English speaker already produces: a, b, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, s, t, v. The work for an adult learner is concentrated in a smaller set of specific sounds and rules:

1. The u sound (the rounded ee), with no English equivalent. The highest-leverage drill.
2. The uvular r, made at the back of the throat.
3. The nasal vowels (an, in, on, un), and the rule that m/n disappear as consonants when they form one.
4. Liaison, which brings silent letters back to life across word boundaries.
5. The silent finals in general, and the CaReFuL exceptions.
6. The j and soft g ("zh" as in measure), which English speakers default to the "j" of "jam".
7. The qu = k rule (qui is "kee", not "kwee"; quand is "kahn", not "kwand").

Get those right and you have a credible French accent. Everything else is vocabulary and time.

A note on irregularity

French spelling has a reputation for being irregular, and it earns it on the writing side: many words have far more letters than sounds, and several distinct words are spelled identically (vers / vert / verre / ver / vair all sound the same). But the rules going from spelling to sound are reasonably consistent. Once you have the alphabet, diacritics, silent-final defaults, and liaison rules, you can read aloud almost any French word you have never seen and be right most of the time. Going the other way, from sound to spelling, is genuinely hard, and French children spend years on dictation exercises for a reason.

That asymmetry is the truth about French orthography: reading-friendly for learners, writing-hostile for natives. As an adult learner whose first job is to read aloud, you have the easier end of the bargain.