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reforms of French orthography

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Superior Council of the French Language andAcadémie française

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TheFrench spelling reforms of 1990 were proposed by theConseilsupérieurde lalanguefrançaise and approved by theAcadémiefrançaise on May 3, 1990. Some are now more prevalent than the still correct pre-1990 spellings, but many less. On Wiktionary, French words with revised spellings are usually treated as alternative spellings, while the traditional spelling is the main article.

The Académie française of France controls the de jure form of the French language in France, while outside of France, its strictures are not mandated. Instead local versions of that body may choose to follow or ignore its mandates, leading to different de jure forms of the French language.

Numbers are to be written with hyphens instead of spaces, to reduce ambiguity (particularly where fractions are involved):

The nounsmillion,milliard etc. are not hyphenated:douze milliards trois-cent-quarante-cinq millions six-cent-cinquante-quatre-mille-trois-cent-vingt-et-un (12 345 654 321).

Many words with hyphens did not change in the plural, for exampleungratte-ciel,desgratte-ciel. The reform has all compound words pluralized according to the normal French rules of pluralization; however, words that contain singular articles (such astrompe-la-mort) or capital letters (such asprie-Dieu) remain invariable.

Furthermore, hyphenated words that begin withcontre- orentre-, are onomatopoeic, are borrowed from foreign languages, or contain one or more words that do not occur independently lose their hyphens altogether.

Some French words borrowed from other languages retain their non-French plurals, such asunmatch,desmatches, or did not have a diacritic that would be used if the word were a native French word. The reform gives all loanwords French plurals (usually a single-s) and diacritics.

The spelling reforms also affect accents. When ané is pronounced/ɛ/ rather than/e/, it should be represented byè instead. Exceptions are: the prefixesdé- andpré- when they precede more than one consonant sound, and the firsté inmédecin andmédecine.

Circumflexes in French generally stem fromLatin andOld French roots where ans has beenelided. For example,goûter is from the Old Frenchgouster. However the circumflex does not change the pronunciation of most words containing it when used on the lettersi andu, making it “obsolete”, according to the reforms. Therefore it has been removed from nearly all words that contain it. It is kept in cases where it does indicate different pronunciation, as injeûne (pronounced differently fromjeune), and where it distinguishes between twohomophones: that is, the masculine singular (but not the feminine or plurals) of the adjectivesdû,mûr, andsûr (to distinguish them from the wordsdu,mur, andsur), and the forms of the verbcroitre that could be mistaken for parallel forms of the verbcroire without a circumflex. It is also retained in the very common verbêtre and in the past historic (first and second persons plural) and past subjunctive (third person singular), by analogy withverbs of the first conjugation that containâ (which is still pronounced differently froma in some accents).

In sequences such as-gue- and-gui-, adiaeresis is placed on theu and not on any other letter. This is to indicate the correct pronunciation in a more intuitive fashion:

Aseu in French normally represents/ø/ or/œ/, a diaeresis is added to the following words, to indicate the pronunciation:

Except forappeler,jeter, and their compounds and derivatives, verbs with infinitives in-eler and-eter take agrave accent on thee (è) instead of doubling the consonant before a mutee. The same rules apply to terms derived from these verbs:

The verbcréneler is complicated by the new rules regardingé andè:

The lasti is dropped as it is not pronounced. The exceptions are names of plants, such asgroseillier, so as to preserve the suffix-ier.

Words ending in-olle and verbs ending in-otter now only require one consonant, as dropping thel or thet does not change the pronunciation. Exceptions arecolle,folle,molle, and terms derived from nouns ending in-otte, such asbotte(“boot”) andbotter,botterie,bottière.

The past participle oflaisser(“to let, to permit, to allow”) becomes invariable (no feminine or plural forms) when followed by an infinitive.

Tu les as laissées sur la table ? ―Did you leave them on the table?

Je les ai laissé partir. ―I let them leave.

To prevent anomalies between related words, and to align spelling more closely with actual pronunciation, the following additional changes have been made. The new spellings also apply to the derivatives of these words. In many cases the "new" spellings were already in use as alternatives before the reforms legitimized them.

• French terms with usage examples
• French appendices
• Spelling appendices