French orthography

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. Even in the late 17th century, with the publication of the first French dictionary by the Académie française, there were attempts to reform French orthography.
This has resulted in a complicated relationship between spelling and sound, especially for vowels; a multitude of silent letters; and many homophones—e.g., "/////" (all pronounced ) and "//" (all pronounced ). This is conspicuous in verbs: ' (you speak), ' (I speak) and ' (they speak) all sound like . Later attempts to respell some words in accordance with their Latin etymologies further increased the number of silent letters (e.g., ' vs. older ' – compare English "tense", which reflects the original spelling – and ' vs. older "").
Nevertheless, there are rules governing French orthography which allow for a reasonable degree of accuracy when pronouncing French words from their written forms. The reverse operation, producing written forms from pronunciation, is much more ambiguous. The French alphabet uses a number of diacritics including the circumflex. A system of braille has been developed for people who are visually impaired.
Alphabet.
The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, with five diacritics and two orthographic ligatures.
The letters and are rarely used except in loanwords and regional words. The phoneme sound is usually written ; the sound is usually written anywhere but before , before , and sometimes at the ends of words. However, is common in the metric prefix kilo- (originally from Greek "khilia" "a thousand"): "kilogramme, kilomètre, kilowatt, kilohertz," etc.
Diacritics.
The usual diacritics are the acute (, "accent aigu"), the grave (, "accent grave"), the circumflex (, "accent circonflexe"), the diaeresis (, "tréma"), and the cedilla (, "cédille"). Diacritics have no effect on the primary alphabetical order.
The tilde diacritical mark ( ˜ ) above n is occasionally used in French for words and names of Spanish origin that have been incorporated into the language (e.g., "El Niño"). Like the other diacritics, the tilde has no impact on the primary alphabetical order.
Diacritics are often omitted on capital letters, mainly for technical reasons. It is widely believed that they are not required; however both the Académie française and the Office québécois de la langue française reject this usage and confirm that "in French, the accent has full orthographic value", except for acronyms but not for abbreviations (e.g., "CEE", "ALENA", but "É.-U."). Nevertheless, diacritics are often ignored in word games, including crosswords, Scrabble, and "Des chiffres et des lettres".
Ligatures.
The two ligatures "œ" and "æ" have orthographic value. For determining alphabetical order, these ligatures are treated like the sequences "oe" and "ae".
Œ.
(, "o-e entrelacé" or "o et e collés/liés") This ligature is a mandatory contraction of in certain words. Some of these are native French words, with the pronunciation or , e.g., "chœur" "choir" , "cœur" "heart" , "mœurs" "moods (related to moral)" , "nœud" "knot" , "sœur" "sister" , "œuf" "egg" , "œuvre" "work (of art)" , "vœu" "vow" . It usually appears in the combination "œu"; "œil" "eye" is an exception. Many of these words were originally written with the digraph "eu"; the "o" in the ligature represents a sometimes artificial attempt to imitate the Latin spelling: Latin "bovem" &gt; Old French "buef"/"beuf" &gt; Modern French "bœuf".
"Œ" is also used in words of Greek origin, as the Latin rendering of the Greek diphthong "οι", e.g., "cœlacanthe" "coelacanth". These words used to be pronounced with the vowel , but in recent years a spelling pronunciation with has taken hold, e.g., "œsophage" or , "Œdipe" or etc. The pronunciation with is often seen to be more correct.
When "œ" is found after the letter "c", the "c" can be pronounced in some cases ("cœur"), or in others ("cœlacanthe").
The ligature œ is not used when both letters contribute different sounds. For example, when is part of a prefix ("coexister"), or when is part of a suffix ("minoen"), or in the word "moelle" and its derivatives.
Æ.
(, "a-e entrelacé" or "a, e collés/liés") This ligature is rare, appearing only in some words of Latin and Greek origin like "tænia", "ex æquo", "cæcum", "æthuse" (as named "dog’s parsley"). It generally represents the vowel , like .
The sequence appears in loanwords where both sounds are heard, as in "maestro" and "paella".
Digraphs and trigraphs.
French digraphs and trigraphs have both historical and phonological origins. In the first case, it is a vestige of the spelling in the word's original language (usually Latin or Greek) maintained in modern French, for example, the use of in words like "téléphone", in words like "théorème", or in "chaotique". In the second case, a digraph is due to an archaic pronunciation, such as , , , , and , or is merely a convenient way to expand the twenty-six-letter alphabet to cover all relevant phonemes, as in , , , , , and . Some cases are a mixture of these or are used for purely pragmatic reasons, such as for in "il mangeait" ('he ate'), where the serves to indicate a "soft" inherent in the verb's root, similar to the significance of a cedilla to .
Spelling to sound correspondences.
Some exceptions apply to the rules governing the pronunciation of word-final consonants. See Liaison (French) for details.
There are no longer silent k's in French. They appeared in skunks, knock-out, knickerbockers and knickers, but from now onwards, the is also pronounced. The only consonants always pronounced equally in French are now and . Also, is always pronounced , even in .
Words from Greek.
The spelling of French words of Greek origin is complicated by a number of digraphs which originated in the Latin transcriptions. The digraphs , , and normally represent , , and in Greek loanwords, respectively; and the ligatures and in Greek loanwords represent the same vowel as (). Further, many words in the international scientific vocabulary were constructed in French from Greek roots and have kept their digraphs (e.g., "stratosphère", "photographie").
History.
The Oaths of Strasbourg from 842 is the earliest text written in the early form of French called Romance or Gallo-Romance.
Roman.
The Gaulish language of the inhabitants of Gaul disappeared progressively over the course of Roman rule as the Latin language began to replace it. Vulgar Latin, a generally lower register of Classical Latin spoken by the Roman soldiers, merchants and even patricians in quotidian speech, and adopted by the natives, evolved slowly, taking the forms of different spoken Roman vernaculars according to the region of the empire.
Eventually the different forms of Vulgar Latin would evolve into three branches in the Gallo-Romance language sub-family, the langues d'oïl north of the Loire, the langues d'oc in the south, and the Franco-Provençal languages in part of the east.
Old French.
In the 9th century, the Romance vernaculars were already quite far from Latin. For example, to understand the Bible, written in Latin, footnotes were necessary. With consolidation of royal power, beginning in the 13th century, the "Francien" vernacular, the langue d'oil variety in usage then on the Île-de-France (region around Paris), brought it little by little to the other languages and evolved toward Classic French.
The languages found in the manuscripts dating from the 9th century to the 13th century form what is known as Old French or "ancien français." These languages continued to evolve until, in the 14th century to the 16th century, Middle French ("moyen français") emerged.
Middle French.
During the Middle French period (c. 1300–1600), modern spelling practices were largely established. This happened especially during the 16th century, under the influence of printers. The overall trend was towards continuity with Old French spelling, although some changes were made under the influence of changed pronunciation habits; for example, the Old French distinction between the diphthongs "eu" and "ue" was eliminated in favor of consistent "eu", as both diphthongs had come to be pronounced or (depending on the surrounding sounds). However, many other distinctions that had become equally superfluous were maintained, e.g. between "s" and soft "c" or between "ai" and "ei". It is likely that etymology was the guiding factor here: the distinctions "s/c" and "ai/ei" reflect corresponding distinctions in the spelling of the underlying Latin words, whereas no such distinction exists in the case of "eu/ue".
This period also saw the development of some explicitly etymological spellings, e.g. "temps" ("time"), "vingt" ("twenty") and "poids" ("weight") (note that in many cases, the etymologizing was sloppy or occasionally completely incorrect; "vingt" reflects Latin "viginti", with the "g" in the wrong place, and "poids" actually reflects Latin "pensum", with no "d" at all; the spelling "poids" is due to an incorrect derivation from Latin "pondus"). The trend towards etymologizing sometimes produced absurd (and generally rejected) spellings such as "sçapvoir" for normal "savoir" ("to know"), which attempted to combine Latin "sapere" ("to be wise", the correct origin of "savoir") with "scire" ("to know").
Classical French.
Modern French spelling was codified in the late 17th century by the Académie française, based largely on previously established spelling conventions. Some reforms have occurred since then, but most have been fairly minor. The most significant changes have been:
Modern French.
In October 1989, Michel Rocard, then-Prime Minister of France, established the High Council of the French Language () in Paris. He designated experts — among them linguists, representatives of the Académie française and lexicographers — to propose standardizing several points, a few of those points being:
Quickly, the experts set to work. Their conclusions were submitted to Belgian and Québécois linguistic political organizations. They were likewise submitted to the Académie française, which endorsed them unanimously, saying: 
"Current orthography remains that of usage, and the 'recommendations' of the High Council of the French language only enter into play with words that may be written in a different manner without being considered as incorrect or as faults."
The changes were published in the "Journal officiel de la République française" in December 1990. At the time the proposed changes were considered to be suggestions. In 2016, schoolbooks in France began to use the newer recommended spellings, with instruction to teachers that both old and new spellings be deemed correct.
Punctuation.
In France and Belgium, the exclamation mark, question mark, semicolon, colon, percentage mark, currency symbols, hash, and guillemet all require a non-breaking space before and after the punctuation mark. Outside of France and Belgium, this rule is often ignored. Computer software may aid or hinder the application of this rule, depending on the degree of localisation, as it is marked differently from most other Western punctuation.
Hyphens.
The hyphen in French has a particular use in geographic names that is not found in English.
Traditionally, the "specific" part of placenames, street names, and organization names are hyphenated (usually namesakes). 
For instance, (Square of the Battle of Stalingrad []); 
and (named after Blaise Pascal). 
Likewise, Pas-de-Calais is actually a place on land; the real (“strait”) is .
However, this rule is not uniformly observed in official names, e.g., either or , but normally has no hyphens. 
The names of Montreal Metro stations are consistently hyphenated when suitable, but those of Paris Métro stations mostly ignore this rule. (For more examples, see )