Guide to French accents

If you want to be able to read and write in French, you need to understand accents.

We're not talking about accents in the sense of the way people talk - although these are also important to learn for listening and speaking. What we're exploring here are the diacritics - little symbols - that appear above or below letters in French, and provide clues as to how to pronounce them.

Let's take a look at the different accents used in French.

The acute accent is only used for the vowel 'e', which is normally pronounced like the 'e' in 'red' in English, or in some cases the 'a' in 'bad'. When we use an acute accent on 'e', the pronunciation changes to rhyme with 'say' or 'day' in English.

Examples of words which use acute accents:

• réalité (reality)
• été (summer)
• café
• the past participle of -er verbs, such as mangé, parlé etc.

The grave accent can be applied to 'a', 'e' and 'u'.

'È' is always pronounced like the 'e' in 'bed'.

When applied to 'a' or 'u', a grave accent does not alter the vowel's pronunciation.

'À' mainly appears in short words such as 'là' and 'à'.

'Ù' appears in just one word, 'où', meaning 'where'. This helps to distinguish it from 'ou', which without the accent means 'or'.

Examples of words which use grave accents:

• chèvre (goat)
• voilà
• près (near)

The circumflex was first introduced in the 16th century, and has developed a few different functions. In some words, it stands in for a letter that was once part of the word but isn't any longer. The word 'forêt', for example, was once spelt 'forest' (as you may have guessed, this is where the English word 'forest' comes from). Here the circumflex stands in for the absent 's'.

The circumflex is often encountered in homonyms (not to be confused with homophones, which is what these words would be if the circumflex wasn't there to differentiate them). In essence, it helps you understand which definition of a word is implied. If we see 'dû', for example, we know we are dealing with the past participle of 'devoir', rather than 'du', meaning 'of'.

'Â' is pronounced like the 'a' in English 'bad'. 'Ê' is pronounced like the 'e' in 'bet'. 'Ô' is pronounced like the 'o' in 'wrote'.

Examples of words which use circumflexes:

• hôpital (hospital)
• lâcher (to release, drop)
• sûr (sure)
• île (island)

The acute, grave and circumflex accents began life in Ancient Greek, where they were used to denote pitch modulation. The acute was used for a rising intonation, the grave for a falling intonation, and the circumflex for when the pitch rises and then falls in a single syllable.

Today, these symbols are still used to show pitch modulation in Pinyin transcriptions of Mandarin. French isn't a tonal language, which means whether your intonation rises or falls doesn't change the meanings of words, although it's useful to note that a rising intonation is one way we can express a question.

Learners of German might know this by the name of umlaut, but in French we call it the 'tréma'. (Remember that the accent in 'tréma' is not a trema, bur rather an acute accent!) It appears as two dots above the vowel.

Many vowels in French are silent, meaning they aren't pronounced. The trema is there to remove ambiguity by telling you that a vowel should be pronounced. In some words it appears on a vowel that is followed by another vowel - in these cases both vowels should be pronounced separately.

Examples of words which use tremas:

• naïf / naïve (naive)
• Noël (Christmas)
• coïncidence

The cedilla, which looks like a little tail at the bottom of the letter 'c', originated in Spain, and was soon adopted by other Romance languages. Ironically, it is no longer used in Spanish.

In French, it indicates a soft 'c', pronounced like an 's'.

Examples of words which use cedillas:

• garçon (boy)
• français (French)
• reçu (received, past participle of 'recevoir')

Need help with typing these accents on a keyboard? We've got you covered.