French/Diactrics

Unlike English, French uses diacritics, usually the acute, the grave, the circumflex, the diaeresis, and the cedilla. Diacritics have no effect on the primary alphabetical order.


 * Acute accent or accent aigu over e indicates uniquely the sound.
 * Grave accent or accent grave over a or u used primarily to make two words distinct: à ("to") vs. a ("has"), ou ("or") vs. où ("where"). Grave accent over an e, indicates the sound.
 * Circumflex or accent circonflexe over a, e and o indicates the sound, and , respectively. It also indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter (usually an s or a vowel): château < chasteau, fête < feste, sûr < seur, dîner < disner. It has also come to be used to behave like the grave accent: du ("of the") vs. dû (past participle of devoir "to have to do something (pertaining to an act)"). You can drop the circumflex on i and u, but not always: chaîne becomes chaine but sûr (sure) should not be changed because of sur (on).
 * Diaeresis or tréma over e, i, u or y indicates that a vowel is to be pronounced separately from the preceding one: naïve, Noël.
 * The combination of e with diaeresis following o (as in Noël) is nasalized if followed by n: Samoëns.
 * The combination of e with diaeresis following a is either pronounced (Raphaël, Israël ) or not pronounced, leaving only the a (Staël ) and the a is nasalized if aë is followed by n (Saint-Saëns ).
 * You can move the diaeresis in words containing guë onto the u: aiguë becomes aigüe, ciguë becomes cigüe.
 * Cedilla or cédille under c indicates that it is pronounced rather than /k/. Thus je lance "I throw" (with c =  before e) becomes je lançais "I was throwing" (c would be pronounced  before a without the cedilla).