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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:
Languages written with Latin script may indicate nasal vowels by a trailing silent n or m, as is the case in French, Portuguese, Lombard (central classic orthography), Bamana, Breton, and Yoruba. In other cases, they are indicated by diacritics. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasal vowels are denoted by a tilde over
Consonant clusters at the end of words are reduced and often lose altogether the last or two last consonants in both formal and informal Quebec French. The liquids /ʁ/ and /l/ seem to be especially likely to get dropped, as in table, /tabl/ → [tab] , or astre, /astʁ/ → [ast] → [as] 'star'.
When a language is claimed to lack nasals altogether, as with several Niger–Congo languages [note 1] or the Pirahã language of the Amazon, nasal and non-nasal or prenasalized consonants usually alternate allophonically, and it is a theoretical claim on the part of the individual linguist that the nasal is not the basic form of the consonant ...
2.1 Nasal (stop) consonants. ... This is a list of all the consonants which have a dedicated letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet, ... 7 languages ...
The voiced alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar nasals is n , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is n. The vast majority of languages have either an alveolar or dental nasal.
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.
Lexical (or word-based) stress is used, unlike the prosodic stress of Standard French. Nasal vowels have not changed but are still pronounced as in traditional Parisian French or with a nasal consonant after the vowel: enfant [ɑ̃(ŋ)ˈfɑ̃(ŋ)], pain [pɛ̃(ŋ)], timbre [ˈtɛ̃(m)bʁ(ə)], bon [bɔ̃(ŋ)] and brun [bʁœ̃(ŋ)].