French Orthography.

 

French uses the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and often combines them to modify the pronunciation. This is the case with nasal vowels, for example, which consist of a vowel followed by an n or m. The orthography of French is often seen as complex and irregular. A major difficulty for learners is that the spelling of French words often does not correspond to its pronunciation, as written letters are often not pronounced. A given sound can also often be spelled in several different ways. Diacritic signs are very common in French. They are used sometimes for pronunciation, sometimes to distinguish similar words, and sometimes for etymology alone. There are five diacritic signs: The acute accent (l'accent aigu), é, [e]; the grave accent (l'accent grave), è, [ɛ]; The circumflex (l'accent circonflexe) ê (e.g. forêt— forest) shows that an e is pronounced [ɛ] and that an ô is pronounced [o] (although sometimes, the circumflex has no pronunciation effect); the diaeresis (tréma), which specifies that this vowel is pronounced separately from the preceding one; and the cedilla (la cédille) ç (e.g. garçon—boy). All other accents are used only to distinguish similar words, as in the case of distinguishing the adverbs là and où ("there", "where") from the article la ("the" feminine singular) and the conjunction ou ("or") respectively (Lodge, Armstrong, Ellis, & Shelton, 1997).