How French accent marks can help improve your pronunciation

One thing you might have noticed about French spelling is that you use accent marks on a lot of words and letters. These are really useful cues about French pronunciation: Unlike Spanish, which mostly uses accent marks for word stress, French accent marks are all about which exact sound to make, and it’s easy to remember! Here’s the TL;DR for standard French (one of many varieties of French):

• French é: like the “ay” in Scottish English
  today
• French è: like the “e” in American English
  met
• French ê: also like the “e” in
  met
  !
• French à/ù: like French a/u
• French â/ê/î/ô/û: like French a/e/i/o/u
• French aï: like English “I” as in
  I love French!
• French ç: like English “s” in
  song

The story of each accent mark is a little different, and they all show how pronunciation changes over time and how we innovate ways to make that clear in writing. (Unless the language is English, which prefers to keep pronunciation maddeningly opaque.) In French, accent marks show the pronunciation of a word and a bit of its history!

Here are the main types of accent marks, what they’re called, and what they tell you about French pronunciation:

Accent aigu: é

The accent aigu is the accent mark that leans to the right on top of “é,” and it represents the same sound as in the Scottish English pronunciation of today and fate. (If you know the IPA, that’s /e/.) Many French words that start with é used to have an “s” sound after the “é,” which you’ll still see (and hear!) in related languages like Spanish. Over time, some “s” sounds stopped being pronounced in French and then disappeared in spelling. Here are some examples of French words with an accent aigu and their Spanish counterparts that still have an “s”:

Here are some of the many places you’ll find é with accent aigu:

• In the past tense forms of verbs, like
  parlé
  (spoken) and
  mangé
  (eaten)
• In nouns that end in -ty in English, like “university” and “liberty”:
  université
  ,
  liberté
• In the ending -ée, which sometimes has the same meaning as the English ending -ful:
  une fusée
  (a rocket),
  une cuillerée
  (a spoonful)
• In some names for people (
  Amélie
  ,
  Édouard
  ) and places (
  Pézenas
  ,
  Béthune
  )

Note that the accent aigu can only be found on top of the letter e in French. 

Accent grave: è, à, ù

The accent grave is the accent mark that leans to the left on top of an “è” and occasionally on “à” and “ù.” The “è” with accent grave is pronounced like in the American English words bet and met.

Here are just a few examples of where you’ll find è with accent grave:

• In the feminine forms of adjectives and nouns, like
  entière
  (whole) and
  complète
  (complete)
• In the ending used for ordinal numbers, like
  deuxième
  (second) and
  centième
  (hundredth)
• In certain verb forms where the infinitive contains regular e without an accent mark:
  j’achète
  (“I buy” from
  acheter
  “to buy”),
  elle mène
  (“she leads” from
  mener
  “to lead”)

Note that when accent grave appears on top of letters other than e, it doesn’t affect pronunciation! So a in il a (he has) sounds identical to the preposition à in à la maison (at home), and ou (or) sounds identical to où (where)! In these examples, the accent grave simply helps clarify the meaning of the word if you’re reading it.

Accent circonflexe: â, ê, î, ô, û

The accent circonflexe, or circumflex accent, can be thought of affectionately as a little hat that can go on any vowel in French except “y”: “â,” “ê,” “î,” “ô,” “û.” The circumflex accent doesn’t change the pronunciation of a vowel, but it shows some French language history, like where there used to be a neighboring “s” sound or where there used to be a long vowel from Latin.

The next sections introduce two interesting types of markings in French—the tréma and the cédille. These aren’t technically accents but they affect the way letters are pronounced!

Le tréma: ë, ï, ü

The tréma looks like two small dots, and it appears in French on top of “ë,” “ï” and “ü” (and very rarely on “ÿ” in some place names). It is used to show that two vowels that are next to each other in a word are pronounced separately, and not as a single sound. Compare “ai” in mais (but) and quai (platform) to “aï” in maïs (corn), naïf (naive) and Haïti (Haiti)—you should be able to hear the difference!

La cédille: ç

The cédille or cedilla (little tail on the letter “c”) shows that the “c” should be pronounced like “s”! In French, the letter “c” is typically pronounced like the English “k” when it comes before the vowels “a,” “o,” “œ,” and “u”: café (cafe), comme (like), cœur (heart), and cure (cure). But sometimes a “c” is in a word for historical spelling reasons, but the sound it makes is actually “s.” For example, all the different verb forms of commencer (to start) have a “c” or “ç” before the ending, so that no matter which letter the ending starts with, you always know to pronounce “c” like “s”: je commence (I start) and nous commençons (we start) are both pronounced with “s” sounds, even when an “o” comes after the “ç.”

Tiny marks, big clues

Lucky for French learners, accent marks pack in both history and pronunciation information in a tiny, vowel-sized package. Now that you know what each accent signals and what sound each French letter makes, make sure you get plenty of practice reading familiar and unfamiliar words—they will soon become much easier to pronounce correctly! Tu vas y arriver ! 💪