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French phonology is the sound system of French.This article discusses mainly the phonology of all the varieties of Standard French.Notable phonological features include the uvular r present in some accents, nasal vowels, and three processes affecting word-final sounds:
French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language. Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for the wide differences between current spelling and pronunciation. Some of the most profound changes have been: The loss of almost all final consonants.
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.
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 spelling, like English spelling, tends to preserve obsolete pronunciation rules. This is mainly due to extreme phonetic changes since the Old French period, without a corresponding change in spelling. Moreover, some conscious changes were made to restore Latin orthography (as with some English words such as "debt"):
List of languages Language Language family Phonemes Notes Ref Total Consonants Vowels, [clarification needed] tones and stress Arabic (Standard) Afroasiatic: 34: 28 6 Number of phonemes in Modern Standard Arabic, without counting the long vowels /eː/ and /oː/ which are phonemic in Mashriqi dialects or other dialectal phonemes.
The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association. It is not a complete list of all possible speech sounds in the world's languages, only those about which stand-alone articles exist in this encyclopedia.
In most cases, (older) French French and Canadian French agree on which which words have [ɛ] and which ones have [ɛː]. However, they differ on some words. Mètre is a poor example to illustrate [ɛː] because while for Canadians this vowel is indeed long, it is short for those speakers in France who maintain the distinction.