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French phonology displays variation due to regional dialects. This article aims at displaying a complete overview of French normal and possible phonemes and their most common allophones.
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Vowels
The vowels to the left of the dot • have a "grinned" lip position, those to the right of the dot • have a fully rounded lip position, and the schwa in the center of the chart has a slack, neutral lip position. See Vowel roundedness.
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Oral vowels
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Nasal vowels
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Vowel quantity
Certain dialects, notably Quebec French and Belgian French, make a distinction between long and short vowels, in final syllables only. The occurrence of long vowels can vary widely among dialects. Generally, the following vowels are long:
, , and , when followed by one or more consonants, e.g. base, ; flamme,
other vowels followed by one of the voiced fricatives (), e.g. sœur, ; brave,
nasal vowels followed by one or more consonants, e.g. romance, ; emprunte,
Other vowels are long due to compensatory lengthening: in syllables where a consonant in the syllable coda has been lost, the vowel becomes long. The overwhelming majority of these cases are due to the loss of s:
Old French > Modern French "bête"
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Consonants
Where symbols for consonants occur in pairs, the left represents the voiceless consonant and the right represents the voiced consonant.
Notes:
, and are never aspirated in French, unless one wants to indicate contempt. The designation of , , and as dental has been disputed. See Dental consonant.
The grapheme r allows a wide range of allophones in French. , , , , and will all be recognized as "r", but most of them will be considered dialectal. For example, is considered typical of a Parisian accent, while is sometimes found in southern France, less and less in the Montréal area and in Cajun French.
The velar nasal is not a native phoneme of French, but occurs in loan words such as parking or camping. Many speakers (mostly old people and those who are not accustomed to this foreign sound) replace it with a prenazalized sequence. In Quebec French, is pronounced , so these loanwords rhyme with ligne and signe. The velar nasal is also heard in the accent of the city of Marseille after nasal vowels, e.g. malin, .
is slowly disappearing in favor of a sequence in some dialects
and in French are mostly allophones of and before a vowel. The only case where contrasts with is when there is a morphemic boundary, causing some forms of verbs ending in -oua ( or ) such as loua ("he rented") and noua ("he knotted, he tied") to contrast with words ending with the oi () diphthong, such as loi ("law"), and noix ("nut").
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Examples of French plosive consonants
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Vowel-lengthening consonants
The consonants cause automatic lengthening of the previous vowels. While this is not phonemic in itself, it might cause vowels to change quality in dialects where short and long vowels are of different qualities.
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See also
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