French alphabet

The French alphabet is the alphabet used to write French. It uses the modern Latin alphabet with its 26 letters to which must be added the letters from five diacritics, which then enrich it with thirteen accentuated vowels and the grapheme c cedilla "ç", as well as two ligatures e in the a " æ Æ "and e in the o" œ Œ ". It is therefore a total of 42 letters that make up the French alphabet.

In this chapter, you will get an overview about the French alphabet, the look and the differences between them 

What are the letters of the alphabet in French ?

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Fundamental French alphabet

There are 6 vowels in French: a, e, y, o, u, i 

The proper alphabet in French

These letters are variant of the fundamental alphabet and can be taken from the Latin language.

The grave accent in the French alphabet

In French, only the vowels a, e, u can take a grave accent. The French grave accent is (`) and the vowels which take it are: 

With the vowels a and u, the accent does not modify the pronunciation but is only used for the homonym. and ù is also the interrogative or relative pronoun used to differentiate it from the coordinating conjunction. 

With the vowel e, the accent indicates the pronunciation of an open e

The "e" grave accent appears in a word ending in "s".

• Après, dès, excès, accès, procès, près
   

The circumflex accent in the French alphabet 

In French, the letters a, e, i, o, u can take this accent and is written (ˆ) and it indicates 

• the pronunciation of an a, an e or an o
• the amassment of an old letter
• fortuitously, as a discriminating sign to distinguish homophones

Generally, you use it to "open" the vowel, 

The circumflex accent is sometimes used to signal a missing letter

Since 1990, the circumflex accent is barely used on the i and u: you use it on conjugated verbs in the past simple, subjunctive imperfect and the pluperfect 

The acute accent in the French alphabet 

In French, you can find an acute accent (ˊ) on the vowel e used to distinguish the phoneme with the closed tone /e/ from the phoneme /ə/. 

You can meet it exceptionally on:

• open e /ɛ / 
• in inverted subject verbs (aimé-je)
• in some verbal forms (je protégerais)
• in some words (évènement)

​The ç in the French alphabet 

The ç changes the pronunciation of the alphabet letter c. You can put it in front of letters like: a, o, u. 

The umlet in the French alphabet

The umlet are the two points that you put on the e, i, u to indicate that the preceding vowel must be pronounced separately.

The usage of ë, ü is rather rare in French and is only found in two categories of words. It is found in certain words where the umlaut indicates that:

• the preceding vowel is pronounced separately
• in particular names proper or words with several current spellings 

Learn about the pronunciation of all these letters of the French alphabet in the following page !