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02. Vowels

Standard French has twelve oral vowels (counting the mute e, the schwa, as the twelfth), four nasal vowels (three for most speakers in France) and three glides (01. Consonants §2.7). The system is rich in front rounded vowels (/y ø œ/) and in nasal vowels, has no diphthongs, and has no reduction of unstressed vowels to a single neutral vowel as English has. Almost every oral vowel keeps its quality in every syllable, which gives French its clear vowel sound; the exception is the mute e (§8), a vowel that comes and goes. A second characteristic is that the system is eroding unevenly: several oppositions that the older descriptions give (/a/–/ɑ/, /ɛ̃/–/œ̃/, /e/–/ɛ/ in final syllables, vowel length) are lost for most speakers in France and kept in Belgium, Switzerland and Québec (§7).

1. How the vowels are classified

French vowels are classified by:

Bourciez counts fifteen distinct vowels in the French of his day, among them the four nasals sang, vin, son, brun, and adds the mute e as a further, "dull" vowel (bourciez-1921).

2. The inventory with keywords

front unroundedfront roundedback roundedcentral
close/i/ vie/y/ vu/u/ vous
close-mid/e/ blé/ø/ peu/o/ beau/ə/ le
open-mid/ɛ/ belle/œ/ peur/ɔ/ botte
open/a/ patte/ɑ/ pâte
nasal/ɛ̃/ vin/œ̃/ brun/ɔ̃/ vont/ɑ̃/ vent

2.1 The vowels with spellings

vowelkeywordmain spellingsexamples
/i/viei, î, y, ïici, île, style, maïs
/y/vuu, û, eu (in forms of avoir)tu, sûr, j'ai eu /ʒe y/
/u/vousou, où, oûvous, où, goût
/e/bléé, er and ez in final position, ai (a few), et (et)été, parler, parlez, j'ai, et
/ɛ/belleè, ê, ai, ei, e + two consonants, et finalpère, tête, lait, neige, elle, effet
/ø/peueu, œudeux, bleu, vœu, creuse
/œ/peureu, œu, œpeur, cœur, sœur, œil, accueil
/o/beauo (final or before /z/), ô, au, eaumot, rose, côte, beau, haut
/ɔ/botteo, au (before /ʁ/ in some words)botte, pomme, Paul
/a/pattea, àpatte, là, à
/ɑ/pâteâ, a before /z/ and in a few wordspâte, âge, bas, gaz
/ə/leele, petit, semaine
/ɛ̃/vinin, im, ain, aim, ein, en after é or i, yn, ymvin, important, pain, faim, plein, bien, examen, syntaxe
/ɑ̃/ventan, am, en, emdans, chambre, vent, temps
/ɔ̃/vonton, ombon, ombre, nom
/œ̃/brunun, umbrun, parfum, lundi

2.2 Minimal pairs

contrastpairs
/i–y/si–su, rit–rue, lit–lu
/y–u/tu–tout, du–doux, sur–sourd
/i–e/dit–dé, si–ses, lit–les
/e–ɛ/chantai–chanterais, fée–fait, les–lait (final open syllable, for speakers who keep the contrast)
/ø–œ/jeûne–jeune (rare)
/o–ɔ/saule–sol, côte–cotte, haute–hotte
/a–ɑ/patte–pâte, tache–tâche, mal–mâle
/ɛ–a/père–par, mer–mare
/ɔ̃–ɑ̃/bon–banc, long–lent, son–sans
/ɛ̃–ɑ̃/vin–vent, lin–lent, pain–pan
/ɛ̃–œ̃/brin–brun, empreint–emprunt (merged for most speakers in France)
oral–nasalbeau–bon, pas–pan, fait–fin, lait–lin

3. The vowels described

3.1 Close vowels /i y u/

3.2 Mid vowels /e ɛ ø œ o ɔ/

The three pairs are in a complementary-contrastive relationship: contrastive in some positions and predictable in others (§4). Each pair also gets its quality from the position in the syllable.

3.3 The open vowels /a ɑ/

Passy gives /a/ with the tongue forward and the corners of the lips spread, short in rat, patte and long in part, page, boîte (passy-1906). Martinon (martinon-1913) distinguishes a bright, generally short /a/ (patte, tache, mal) from a darker, long, "closed" /ɑ/ (pâte, tâche, grâce, âme) and warns that a single description does not cover the two. The distinction is now carried by a limited set of words, and in most of France patte and pâte are homophones, both /pat/ (§7). The back /ɑ/ is better kept in Belgium, Québec and conservative speech, where it is long (pâte [pɑːt]).

4. The law of position (loi de position)

The choice between the close-mid and the open-mid member of each pair is largely predictable from the syllable:

syllable typeclose-midopen-mid
open (ends in a pronounced vowel)normal: blé /ble/, peu /pø/, beau /bo/rare
closed by a pronounced consonantrare (before /z/ and in a few words: rose /ʁoz/, jeûne /ʒøn/, chose, heureuse)normal: belle /bɛl/, peur /pœʁ/, botte /bɔt/

The usual statement is that /e ø o/ occur in open syllables and /ɛ œ ɔ/ in closed syllables, so that the vowel quality alone tells the syllable type and the pairs beau–botte, peu–peur are better described as variants of "a mid vowel" than as distinct phonemes. The statement is well known, but it needs three qualifications.

  1. Contrast in the final open syllable. In a final open syllable the pair is contrastive for those speakers that keep it: fée /fe/ against fait /fɛ/, chantai /ʃɑ̃te/ against chanterais /ʃɑ̃tʁɛ/, les /le/ against lait /lɛ/. This is the pair that is lost first: in the south of France and in much casual speech both words of such a pair are said with the same mid vowel [e̞].
  2. Exceptions in the closed syllable. /o/ stands in a closed syllable before /z/ (rose, chose, ose), in -ome words such as atome, fantôme, and in most words spelled ⟨ô⟩ or ⟨au⟩ (côte, pôle, haute, saule), though not in all (Paul and mauvais have /ɔ/ for many speakers); /ø/ stands before /z/ (heureuse, creuse), and in jeûne, meule, neutre.
  3. Harmony in the unstressed syllable. In the syllable before the stress, /e ɛ/ and /o ɔ/ tend to take the quality of the stressed vowel that follows (vowel harmony): mettait may be [mɛtɛ] or [mete], maison [mɛzɔ̃] or [mezɔ̃]. Martinon notes that in fêlure, bêtise, têtu and even entêté the ⟨ê⟩ closes, against the open vowel of fêle, bête, tête, but he adds that this belongs to everyday speech and would not be accepted in verse (martinon-1913, § 72).

Stevenson and Zamuner tested the notion of a binary contrast in the vowels of Laurentian (Québec) French (stevenson-2017). They selected three pairs by counting minimal pairs and the predictability of their distribution: /a–ɔ/ (gamme /ɡam/ against gomme /ɡɔm/: high contrast), /o–ʊ/ (rôle /ʁol/ against roule [ʁʊl]: mid contrast), and [y–ʏ] (low contrast: allophones in complementary distribution). In an AX discrimination task with 32 speakers the correct "different" responses (out of 8 trials) averaged 7.91 for the high, 7.63 for the mid and 6.50 for the low-contrast pair, and a similarity-rating task also separated the three; the authors conclude that phonological relationships are gradient, not a simple opposition of contrastive and allophonic. The result matters here because the mid vowels of the law of position are an intermediate case of exactly this kind.

5. Length

Standard descriptions of the Paris French of 1900 gave a rich system of vowel length, which Passy states in detail (passy-1906, §§111–125):

In current standard French from France this system has mostly gone: phonemic length is limited to a few pairs, and the lengthening before /v z ʒ ʁ/ remains as a phonetic tendency of the stressed final syllable. In Belgium, Switzerland and Québec length is phonemically distinct and the pairs mettre /mɛtʁ/ against maître /mɛːtʁ/, patte /pat/ against pâte /pɑːt/ are kept. Riverin-Coutlée's study of absolute-final fricatives in Québec French (coutlee-2020) shows that the voiced fricatives /v z ʒ/ lengthen the preceding stressed vowel robustly, also when the vowel is intrinsically long, so that the vowel duration has a much wider range there than the older descriptions imply.

Bourbon, D'Alessandro and Fougeron (bourbon-2020) studied 29 speakers asked to speak faster and compared reading with repetition, measuring articulation rate and vowel reduction in time and in spectrum. Speakers varied: some sped up with a spectral reduction of vowels, others did not; the authors conclude that fast speech does not impose one pattern of reduction. The finding supports the view that French vowels are not reduced in a regular way, in contrast with English.

6. Nasal vowels

6.1 The four nasal vowels

vowelspellingexamplesmerge
/ɛ̃/in, im, yn, ym, ain, aim, ein, (i/é)envin, simple, pain, faim, plein, bien, examen
/ɑ̃/an, am, en, emdans, champ, vent, temps, emploi
/ɔ̃/on, ombon, ombre, nom
/œ̃/un, umbrun, parfum, lundi, humblemerged with /ɛ̃/ for most speakers in France

The nasal vowels are single phonemes, not sequences of a vowel and a nasal consonant. Bourciez says that nasalisation took place at different periods for different vowels and that in Middle French it was complete (bourciez-1921); in the older language bon and bonne were distinguished by the nasal consonant, and the modern pairs bon–bonne /bɔ̃–bɔn/ and plein–pleine /plɛ̃–plɛn/ are what is left of that stage.

6.2 When a vowel letter plus ⟨n⟩ or ⟨m⟩ is nasal

contextreadingexamples
⟨V + n/m⟩ before a consonant or at the end of the wordnasal vowel; the ⟨n/m⟩ is not pronouncedbanc, bon, faim, temps, chambre, lampe
⟨V + nn/mm⟩ or ⟨V + n/m + vowel⟩oral vowel + consonantbonne, année, animal, inouï, femme
before ⟨b, p⟩ ⟨m⟩ is written, not ⟨n⟩nasallampe, timbre, emporter
prefix en-/em- before ⟨n, m⟩nasal vowel + consonantemmener /ɑ̃mne/, ennuyer /ɑ̃nɥije/
⟨enn, inn, imm⟩ in a few words (ennemi, and the learned prefix in-)oral vowel + consonantennemi /ɛnmi/, innocent /inɔsɑ̃/, immense /imɑ̃s/
word-final ⟨m⟩ in a few loanwordsoral vowel + /m/album /albɔm/, rhum /ʁɔm/, forum

6.3 Alternations between nasal and oral

The nasal vowel of a masculine or a base form is often an oral vowel plus a nasal consonant in the feminine or derived form. The alternation is what keeps the nasal consonant of the spelling:

nasaloral + consonantgloss
bon /bɔ̃/bonne /bɔn/good
plein /plɛ̃/pleine /plɛn/full
brun /bʁœ̃/brune /bʁyn/brown (here the vowel also changes)
cousin /kuzɛ̃/cousine /kuzin/cousin
an /ɑ̃/année /ane/year
fin /fɛ̃/fine /fin/, finir /finiʁ/fine, finish
il vient /vjɛ̃/ils viennent /vjɛn/he/they come
il prend /pʁɑ̃/ils prennent /pʁɛn/take
bon ami[bɔnami] or [bɔ̃nami]liaison

Notice that in the verb forms and in brun–brune the vowel changes quality as well as nasality: the nasal /ɑ̃/ of prend corresponds to an oral /ɛ/ of prennent. The rule is part of the verb morphology (13. Verbs). The nasal consonant before a vowel is the one that gives the liaison form of un, mon, bon, en (04. Connected speech: enchaînement, liaison, elision, the mute e and assimilation).

6.4 Nasal coarticulation

Vowels before a nasal consonant that is pronounced (the oral vowel in scène /sɛn/, âme /ɑm/) are slightly nasalised, because the soft palate lowers early. Zellou and Chitoran (zellou-2023) measured the degree of this anticipatory nasalisation in 30 speakers of Metropolitan French. French has a lexical contrast between oral and nasal vowels (cède /sɛd/ and saint /sɛ̃/), and they asked whether a word like scène (CVN, with a nasal-vowel minimal-pair competitor) is produced with less coarticulatory nasality than a CVN word with no such competitor. Their result: yes. CVN words with a nasal-vowel competitor had less anticipatory nasalisation, and the effect was larger when the competitor was frequent. The conclusion is that a speaker's phonetic detail depends on the particular word and its neighbours in the lexicon, not only on the phoneme.

6.5 Regional and diachronic notes

7. Splits and mergers: why accents differ

oppositionParis (most speakers)BelgiumSwitzerlandQuébecSouth
/a–ɑ/ (patte–pâte)merged, front /a/kept (ɑ long)keptkept (long ɑ)merged
/ɛ̃–œ̃/ (brin–brun)merged /ɛ̃/keptkeptkeptkept
/e–ɛ/ in final syllable (fée–fait)partly keptkeptkeptkeptmerged (one mid vowel)
/o–ɔ/kept in closed syllableskeptkeptkeptfollows position
long vowels (mettre–maître)lostkeptkeptkeptlost
/ɛː/ vs /ɛ/ (mère vs mer)lostkeptkeptkept (diphthongised in casual speech)lost
tense vs lax /i y u/tense onlytense onlytense onlylax in closed syllablestense only
mute edropped oftendroppedoften keptdroppedpronounced

The table is a summary of the standard descriptions; the sources we hold for the current state of these mergers are Passy and Martinon for the situation of 1906–1913 and, for Québec, the vowel studies cited in this chapter. A fully current account of the variation by region would need the large reference grammars of §"Wanted" in Sources.

8. The mute e (schwa)

8.1 What it is

The letter ⟨e⟩ in an unstressed position stands for a vowel that may be pronounced, as a rounded mid vowel [ə] or [œ] ("the vowel transcribed [ə] in French is a mid front rounded vowel whose realisation varies across contexts and dialects", Bayles et al.: bayles-2016), or not pronounced at all. It is called e muet, e caduc, e instable, e féminin (the last because it marks the feminine in petite, grande in the written language) or schwa. Bourciez dates its origin to the weakening of the Latin final vowels into a dull vowel e sourd that gradually fell silent; he notes that the sixteenth-century grammarians already called it e féminin and the spelling stopped noting it in some words (seoir, the suffix -eau) (bourciez-1921).

It occurs: (1) inside words, in the first syllable of a polysyllable (semaine, petit, regarder, venir); (2) in one-syllable function words (le, de, ne, je, me, te, se, ce, que); (3) at the end of a word after a consonant (table, porte, rouge, une), where in the standard it is not pronounced except in verse and in the south.

8.2 The law of three consonants

Grammont (1914; card only in the library, grammont-1914) gave the best-known rule for the schwa its usual name: it is pronounced in a sequence of two consonants plus the schwa plus a consonant (CC_C) in order to avoid a cluster of three consonants, and it is dropped when only one consonant precedes (VC_C). Martinon and Passy treat the same facts in the same terms. Examples:

contextruleexamples
V C _ C V (one consonant before)dropssamedi /samdi/, la petite /la ptit/, je te le dis /ʒtəldi/
C C _ C V (two consonants before)staysvendredi /vɑ̃dʁədi/, une petite fille /yn pətit fij/, il me le dit
a chain of schwa syllablesone is kept and one dropped in turnje ne le dis pas [ʒənlədipa] or [ʒnəldipa]; elle ne vient pas keeps it: [ɛlnəvjɛ̃pa] (/lnv/ would be three consonants)
first syllable of a group, after a pauseusually kept, dropped in fast speechDemain [dəmɛ̃] ~ [dmɛ̃], Le train part [lətʁɛ̃paʁ]
before a vowelelided and writtenl'homme, j'ai, qu'elle
word-final, after a vowel or consonantnot pronounced (but see the south, §8.3)une table [yntabl], la porte [lapɔʁt], une amie [ynami]
final, in poetrynot counted at the end of the line; counted before a consonant elsewheresee 03. The syllable, stress, rhythm and intonation §7

Storme (storme-2021) tested this in judgment experiments on stems and on inflected words: the quality of the consonants in the CC_C sequence matters at both levels, with the same asymmetries among clusters in derived and inflected words. A weaker version of the stem-level versus word-level distinction fits better than a strict one, and a constraint-based grammar with the same phonotactic constraints at both levels fits the judgments better than one with different ones. Smith and Pater (smith-2020) added a second factor, the rhythmic clash between stressed syllables: the schwa is more likely after two consonants than after one, and more likely between stressed syllables than elsewhere, and the two factors combine more than additively; they show that weighted constraints model this better than ranked ones. Their example is a schwa inserted after a word-final cluster: film is more likely to be followed by [œ] in un film russe [ɛ̃ ˈfilmœ ˈʁys], where two stresses would clash, than in un film danois (smith-2020).

8.3 What speakers actually do

8.4 The schwa and the grammar

Pomino and Remberger (pomino-2022) ask whether French verbs have a theme vowel. Basing their argument on psycholinguistic evidence and Distributed Morphology, they argue that two conjugation classes are thematic: the aimer class with a theme vowel [-ə-] and the finir class with [-is-], while the others are athematic. For a grammar of French the point is that the mute e of the infinitive, future and conditional of the -er verbs (je parlerai /ʒə paʁləʁe/ → [ʒpaʁləʁe]) is a morphological vowel as well as a phonological one; see 13. Verbs.

In frequent function words the schwa is a vowel of grammar: le (article, pronoun), de, ne, je, me, te, se, ce, que. In UD French GSD (345,183 syntactic words without punctuation, numerals and symbols, the contractions split so that du counts as de + le, 2026-11-06) these words are very frequent: de 27,024, le 15,740, que 1,962, se 1,346, ce 1,148, ne 813, je 326, me 73, te 4, together 48,436 tokens, 14.0% of all tokens, and the elided forms (l', d', j', qu', n', s', c', m', t') end 16,486 tokens (4.8%). In the spoken treebank ParisStories (train, 18,176 tokens without punctuation) the clitic forms are je 343, j' 248, ne 18, n' 31, ce 83, c' 357, de 631, d' 133, le 516, l' 157; ne and n' together are 49 tokens (0.27%) against 1,435 in GSD train (722 + 713, 0.45% of 315,630 tokens), a measure of the dropping of ne in speech (train files, 2026-11-06).

9. Weak vowels, filled pauses and reduction

French does not reduce unstressed vowels to schwa, so the English "weak form" system has no counterpart. What it has instead are:

10. How often each vowel occurs

No pronunciation lexicon is available to count vowel phonemes. The written text shows the vowel letters. In UD French GSD (345,183 word tokens, 1,629,465 letters, 2026-11-06): ⟨e⟩ 247,250 (15.2%), ⟨a⟩ 123,742 (7.6%), ⟨i⟩ 115,747 (7.1%), ⟨o⟩ 86,890 (5.3%), ⟨u⟩ 80,285 (4.9%), ⟨é⟩ 39,382 (2.4%), ⟨à⟩ 10,664, ⟨è⟩ 6,465, ⟨ê⟩ 1,893, ⟨ô⟩ 822, ⟨â⟩ 705, ⟨î⟩ 638, ⟨ù⟩ 392, ⟨û⟩ 336, ⟨œ⟩ 281, ⟨ï⟩ 227, ⟨ë⟩ 65, ⟨ü⟩ 58, ⟨y⟩ 5,749. Capital accented letters are counted separately in the file (É 585, À 210) and are therefore not in these figures. Digraphs: ⟨ou⟩ occurs in 15,031 tokens, ⟨ai⟩ 13,206, ⟨eu⟩ 8,573, ⟨au⟩ 6,259, ⟨oi⟩ 5,580, ⟨eau⟩ 1,390, ⟨œu⟩ 265.

A rough proxy for syllables, the number of maximal runs of vowel letters in a token (which over-counts ⟨ou, eau⟩-like sequences as one and so under-counts hiatus, and counts a final mute ⟨e⟩): 608,407 runs in 345,183 tokens, 1.76 per token; 167,648 tokens (48.6%) have one run, 103,696 (30.0%) two and the remaining 73,839 (21.4%) three or more.

11. Historical note

Bourciez's Précis historique de phonétique française (bourciez-1921) explains the modern vowels by their Latin sources: the length of many vowels comes from the loss of an s (fête from Old French feste, whence the circumflex) or from a position before /ʁ z v ʒ/ or a final mute e, which is the origin of the lengthening rule of §5. The Old French diphthongs (ai, ei, oi, au, eu) became simple vowels or, in oi, a /wa/ pair in the course of the Middle French period (09. Old, Middle and Classical French, and the literary tenses), and the four nasal vowels arose by nasalisation of the vowel before a nasal consonant, at different times for different vowels, complete by Middle French. The modern spelling still records the older diphthongs (beau, eau, aime, moi, ai) and the lost s (circumflex), which is why the vowel spelling system is so far from the sound system (05. The writing system).

12. How Mova handles vowels

Mova has no vowel model for French. The remarks of 01. Consonants §8 apply: French is read as text, there is no grapheme-to-phoneme rule, no pronunciation lexicon and no schwa model.

Sources for this chapter

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/02-vowels/