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This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of French on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of French in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language.It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100 –1200 AD, and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years.
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.
Although double consonant letters appear in the orthographic form of many French words, geminate consonants are relatively rare in the pronunciation of such words. The following cases can be identified. [15] The geminate pronunciation [ʁʁ] is found in the future and conditional forms of the verbs courir ('to run') and mourir ('to die').
Estimates of phoneme-inventory size can differ radically between sources, occasionally by a factor of several hundred percent. For instance, Received Pronunciation of English has been claimed to have anywhere between 11 and 27 vowels, whereas West ǃXoon has been analyzed as having anywhere from 87 to 164 consonants.
This chart provides audio examples for phonetic vowel symbols. The symbols shown include those in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and added material. The chart is based on the official IPA vowel chart.
In modern Quebec French, the /iː/ phoneme is used only in loanwords: cheap. The phonemes /y/ and /yː/ are not distinct in modern French of France or in modern Quebec French; the spelling <û> was the /yː/ phoneme, but flûte is pronounced with a short /y/ in modern French of France and in modern Quebec French.
Sylvius used the circumflex to indicate so-called "false diphthongs".Early modern French as spoken in Sylvius' time had coalesced all its true diphthongs into phonetic monophthongs; that is, a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation.