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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:
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents French language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
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.
It is phonetically [wɑː] in formal speech, but it can also be pronounced in some additional different ways ([waɪ̯, wɛɪ̯, wei̯, wɛː, wɔː, wɒː]) in joual (boîte 'box' [bwaɪ̯t] ⓘ). Also, there are many words which are pronounced with the long /wɑ/ even though there is no circumflex: coiffe, croissant, soirée and poivre, etc.
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.
The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. [1] The following tables present pulmonic and non-pulmonic consonants.
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.
Some "families" of words from the same root showing inconsistent spellings were uniformized on the model of the most usual word in the "family". imbécillité → imbécilité (idiocy) This rule was also extended to suffixes in two cases, actually changing them into totally different morphemes altogether: