French accent marksare among the defining features of the language, appearing abundantly in any written text. Accent marks in French are integral features of the words in which they appear, so words are spelled incorrectly when they’re omitted.
The French alphabet has the same 26 letters as in English, but certain letters can also take accents. Today we’ll introduce the three accent marks French vowels can take, as well as the two other diacritics that exist in the French alphabet. We’ll also cover the ligatures, which are two letters combined into a single character.
For quick reference, here are all the French accent markswe’ll be introducing:
- L’accent aigu: é
- L’accent grave: à, è, ù
- L’accent circonflexe: â, ê, î, ô, û
The next two aren’t technically considered accent marks in French, but are simply thought of as diacritics. We include them in today’s lesson too:
- Le tréma: ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, ÿ
- La cedille: ç
Finally, the last two are known as ligatures, which are two letters joined into one. We’ll round out today’s lesson with an explanation of the two ligatures that exist in the French language:
- Les ligatures: æ, œ
Read on for the names of French accent marks in English, along with explanations of how each one affects French word pronunciation.
Before we move on though, we’ll just provide a quick list of every single one of these characters for anyone looking for a copy-paste list of French accent marks, diacritics, and ligatures:
à â ä é è ê ë ï ô ö ù û ü ÿ ç æ œ
À Â Ä É È Ê Ï Ô Ö Ù Û Ü Ÿ Ç Æ Œ
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Accent marks vs Diacritic marks
We’re really getting into semantics here in asking which marks are accents in French, and which ones are diacritics. For an English speaker, and indeed for most French speakers who aren’t grammarians, all of them can be called accents.
In French grammar, however, only l’accent aigu, l’accent grave, and l’accent circonflexeare considered accents. Le trémaand la cedilleare just diacritics. But what are diacritics?
Diacriticsare extra markings on or around a letter or group of letters. Diacritics are used to indicate that the letter or letters take a different phonetic value than the unmarked letters.
In other words, all French accent marks are indeed also diacritics. So technically, today’s lesson will cover all of the French diacritic marks, not just the accents.
Finally, we’ll mention that the ligatures are neither accents nor diacritics. We may consider them to be characters, but they’re not even letters on their own: they’re two letters joined together as ligatures.
Do capital letters have accent marks in French?
If you spend much time in France, you may notice that anything written in all-caps seems to lack accents. Indeed, it’s generally acceptable to forgo the diacritics on capital letters.
The practice of ignoring accent marks on capital letters isn’t universal, however, so if you’re trying to write correctly then you should still include them just as you would with lowercase letters. In Québec, for example, accent marks in French are ubiquitous, with no latitude for omitting them on capital letters.
In short, we recommend always including the diacritics, no matter the font or the capitalization. You’ll see them ignored sometimes on capital letters, but you can still make sure to spell everything correctly with all the right accent marks in French!
Now let’s see each of the accent marks French uses, one by one.
French accent marks
As we’ve just seen, there are just three diacritics in French that are considered to be accent marks, so we’ll examine each one in detail here. We’ll move on to the other two French diacritics in the following section.
L’accent aigu: é
L’accent aiguin French is only found on the letter e. The English name for l’accent aiguis the acute accent. This is by far the most common of all the French accents.
The difference in pronunciation between éand eis very subtle, and often imperceptible. In French, the description of its pronunciation is that the éindicates more of a closed sound. For English speakers, this corresponds to a pronunciation approximately between the sound of the word “eh” and the “e” sound in the word “bet.”
The écan appear anywhere in a word. However, it may never appear before a double consonant, nor before a group of consonants.
In general, the érarely appears before a syllable that includes an unaccented e. This rule led to modified spellings of such words in the language reform of 1990, so words like événement and crémerie may now also be spelled évènement and crèmerie.
It’s even possible to have two és next to each other in the same word, resulting in a double pronunciation of the letter. Examples are créée, agréé, réélu, or rééducation.
L’accent aiguis extremely prominent in French participles, since regular -er verbsform their participles by dropping the -erfrom the infinitiveand adding an -é.
A few common words that include l’accent aigu are été, élite, quantité, moitié, électricité, and cérémonie.
L’accent grave: à, è, ù
This diacritic is known as the grave accentin English, or l’accent gravein French. It is particularly common on the letter e, especially in a syllable that precedes another syllable with a silent e.
The pronunciation difference between èvs eis more perceptible than between évs e. We say that the èresults in an open sound. The pronunciation is somewhere between the “e” in the English word “bet” and the “ai” in “air.”
A few common words that include l’accent grave are mère, père, parrallèle, espèce, derrière, and thème.
L’accent grave can also appear on aand u, though only in a few very specific French words. The àis found in the words à, çà, deçà, déjà, delà, holà, là, and voilà. The only French word that contains ùis the word où. The àresults in a much more open sound than a, whereas oùsounds more closed than ou.
L’accent circonflexe: â, ê, î, ô, û
This accent can be found on the French vowels a, e, i, o, and u. Its English name is the circumflex accent, while in French it’s known as l’accent circonflexe. Its appearance in French words is fairly arbitrary; words that contain it are often misspelled.
The pronunciation of syllables that contain â, ê, and ôtends to be a lot more drawn out than with the same unaccented letters, though many people make very little distinction between them when speaking. There’s no perceptible difference in pronunciation between îvs inor between ûvs u.
The appearance of an accent circonflexe in a word is often due to its etymological origins, particularly where archaic spellings included an safter the vowel. This results in certain closely-related words having two different spellings in modern French, such as forêt vs forestier or côte vs accoster.
L’accent circonflexe is very present in a few verb tenses, particularly le passé simple and l’imparfait subjonctif.
Some common French words that contain l’accent circonflexe include châtaigne, pâte, crête, fenêtre, île, chaîne, hôpital, hôte, crû, and croûte.
Other French diacritics
So far we’ve seen the three diacritics that most people think of as French accent marks: l’accent aigu, l’accent grave, and l’accent circonflexe. In addition to those three, we have two other diacritics that aren’t considered accent marks in French: le trémaand la cedille. Let’s examine each of these now.
Le tréma: ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, ÿ
This French diacritic consists of two dots placed horizontally over vowels. It’s commonly known in English as an umlaut, which is borrowed from its German name of Ümlaut. Another English name for this diacritic is a diaeresis, which is related to its Spanish name of diéresis.
In French, le trémais most common on e, i, and u. It exists over the letter yin certain proper nouns, and over the letters aand oin some foreign loanwords. In other words, it’s possible to see le tréma on all the vowelsin French, including y.
When le tréma appears in the middle of a word on the letters e, i, u, and y, it signals a distinct pronunciation of both the letter in question and the preceding vowel. In other words, le tréma causes vowel combinations that would otherwise be pronounced as diphthongs to be pronounced separately. Examples are Noël, Citroën, Raphaël, maïs, héroïne, capharnaüm, l’Haÿ-les-Roses.
Likewise, in words that end in ë, this final vowel is pronounced distinctly from the vowel preceding it. This is quite uncommon, but examples include canoëand Zoë.
This rule of pronunciation does not apply to the letter combination of -gue-. The language reform of 1990 modified such words whose spellings traditionally included a tréma over the final e, placing it instead over the u. This resulted in preferred spellings of aigüe, ambigüe, and contigüe, for example, rather than the older spellings of aiguë, ambiguë, and contiguë. In this case, the pronunciation of -güe requires a much tighter güsound rather than the open gesound of -gue.
La cedille: ç
Our final French diacritic is la cedille, known in English as the cedilla. It appears only on the letter c, and looks like a small comma or inverted-c attached to the bottom of the letter. Çcan appear at the beginning or in the middle of a word, but never as the last letter.
The pronunciation of çis always an ssound. We place the çbefore the vowels a, o, and u, in spellings where a normal cwould otherwise be pronounced with a ksound.
Some common French words that include the çare ça, français, façon, garçon, aperçu, and déçu. You even keep the French çin a few English words such as façade and salade niçoise.
Some closely-related French words need the ç to maintain the pronunciation between their different forms, such as remplacement vs remplaçant, balance vs balaçoire, or nous percevons vs je perçois, for example.
In many cases, la cedille appears in several conjugations of verbs whose infinitives just have c. This is the case, for example, with verbs like recevoir, percevoir, commencer, remplacer, or prononcer.
Les ligatures: æ, œ
The final characters that we have in French are the two ligatures. These are essentially two letters that are printed as one single letter. Such ligatures were more common in archaic forms of modern languages, but their use has gradually disappeared through the ages. Œis nonetheless still relatively common in many everyday French words. Æ, on the other hand, is really just still found in a few obscure French words with strong Latin roots.
Although handwritten French may not always clearly represent the œand æas single letters, they should always appear in printed French. Indeed, words that contain these ligatures require them to be spelled correctly. The French autocorrect feature of word processing software, including the French keyboards on mobile phones, should automatically replace any instances of oeor aein words that require the ligature with œand æ.
The pronunciation of œcalls for a slightly drawn-out vowel sound, partway between an oand an esound. For German speakers, it’s fairly close to the German ösound.
Some common French words that contain the ligature œinclude cœur, sœur, vœux, œuvre, œuf, œil, œnologie, and œstrogène.
The ligature æis extremely obscure in French, and has essentially died out. It may still appear in some Latin words, but even those will probably be spelled with either the modern ésince the pronunciation is the same, or written separately as ae.
Æis arguably more common in English, where the letter is referred to as ash. Archaic spellings of certain words still sometimes appear in English, such as encyclopædia and mediæval, whereas their French counterparts have lost the ligature: encyclopédie and médiéval. Famously, Elon Musk and partner Grimes even included it in their child’s name: X Æ A-12.
Conclusion: French accent marks
Today we introduced all of the accent marksFrench has. We began by defining what we mean by accent marksin French, noting that while all of the French alphabet accents we introduced are considered diacritics, only three of them are recognized as accentsin French. The last two are simply known as ligatures. Then we looked at them all in greater detail.
We learned the names of French accent marks in both languages: l’accent aigu, l’accent grave, and l’accent circonflexeare known respectively in English as the acute accent, the grave accent, and the circumflex accent. The other diacritics are le trémaand la cedille, known respectively in English as the umlautor the diaeresis, and the cedilla. The combined letters æand œare known in both French and English as ligatures.
We saw that l’accent aiguis exclusively found on the letter eas é, l’accent graveis most common with eas èbut also appears in a few words as àand ù, while l’accent circonflexecan appear over the five vowels as â, ê,î, ô, and û. We described the subtle pronunciation differences each of these French accent marks calls for, admitting that it’s often difficult to really perceive much difference between accented and unaccented versions of similar words.
We then described the pronunciations of the other two diacritics, which are a bit easier to master. Le trémacan be found on all the vowels including y, though it’s most common just as ëand ï. Its presence results in a distinct pronunciation of adjacent vowels, rather than combining them into a diphthong. The last French diacritic we saw is la cedille, only found on the letter cas ç, which signals an obligatory s sound.
Finally, we saw that œis an important and relatively common ligature in French, indicating a long vowel pronunciation partway between o and e sounds. The ligature æhas essentially disappeared from contemporary French.
We placed a lot of emphasis on the pronunciation of our different accent marks in French, but we’ll conclude by really underlining their importance in spellingas well. The diacritics we’ve seen here are all integral parts of the French words in which they appear, so make sure you include them in order to practice proper spelling!
