Appendix:French spelling reforms of 1990

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reforms of French orthography

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Superior Council of the French Language and Académie française

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The French spelling reforms of 1990 were proposed by the Conseil supérieur de la langue française and approved by the Académie française 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.

Reforms

Numbers

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

The nouns million, 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).

Words with hyphens

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

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

Plurals and diacritics of loanwords

Some French words borrowed from other languages retain their non-French plurals, such as un match, des matches, 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.

Acute and grave accents on an e

The spelling reforms also affect accents. When an é is pronounced IPA^(key): /ɛ/ rather than IPA^(key): /e/, it should be represented by è instead. Exceptions are: the prefixes dé- and pré- when they precede more than one consonant sound, and the first é in médecin and médecine.

Circumflexes

Circumflexes in French generally stem from Latin and Old French roots where an s has been elided. For example, goûter is from the Old French gouster. However the circumflex does not change the pronunciation of most words containing it when used on the letters i and u, 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 in jeûne (pronounced differently from jeune), and where it distinguishes between two homophones: that is, the masculine singular (but not the feminine or plurals) of the adjectives dû, mûr, and sûr (to distinguish them from the words du, mur, and sur), and the forms of the verb croitre that could be mistaken for parallel forms of the verb croire without a circumflex. It is also retained in the very common verb être and in the past historic (first and second persons plural) and past subjunctive (third person singular), by analogy with verbs of the first conjugation that contain â (which is still pronounced differently from a in some accents).

Use of diaereses

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

As eu in French normally represents IPA^(key): /ø/ or IPA^(key): /œ/, a diaeresis is added to the following words, to indicate the pronunciation:

Verbs ending with -eler and -eter

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

The verb créneler is complicated by the new rules regarding é and è:

Words ending with -illier and -illière

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

Words ending in -olle and -otter

Words ending in -olle and verbs ending in -otter now only require one consonant, as dropping the l or the t does not change the pronunciation. Exceptions are colle, folle, molle, and terms derived from nouns ending in -otte, such as botte (“boot”) and botter, botterie, bottière.

Past participle of laisser

The past participle of laisser (“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.

Miscellaneous reforms

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 officialized them.