حوار بين صحفى ولاعب Dialogue7

There are five different kinds of accent marks used in written French. They are:

accent	letters used	examples
acute accent (accent aigu)	é only	éléphant: elephant
grave accent (accent grave)	è, à, ù	fièvre: fever, là, there où: where
circumflex (accent circonflexe)	â, ê, î, ô, û	gâteau: cake,être: to be, île: island, chômage: unemployment, dû: past participle of devoir
diaeresis (tréma)	ë, ï, ü, ÿ**	Noël: Christmas, maïs: corn, aigüe: acute(fem)*
cedilla (cédille)	ç only	français: French

• Note : As of the spelling reform of 1990, the diaresis indicating gu is not a digraph on words finishing in guë is now placed on the u in standard (AKA "académie française" French) : aigüe and not aiguë, cigüe and not ciguë, ambigüe and not ambiguë (acute(fem), conium, ambiguous). Since this reform is relatively recent and not known in vulgar surrounding, both spellings can be used interchangeably (you might even get a point knocked off if you write "aigüe" in a text, it happened to me!)

• • Note : The letter ÿ is only used in very rare words, most old town names : L'Haÿ-Les-Roses (Paris surburb). Pronounced like ï.

Acute Accent - Accent aigu

The acute accent(French, accent aigu) is the most common accent used in written French. It is only used with the letter e and is always pronounced /ay/.

One use of the accent aigu is to form the past participle of regular -er verbs.

infinitive	past participle
aimer, to love	aimé, loved
regarder, to watch	regardé, watched

Another thing to note is if you are unsure of how to translate certain words into English from French, and the word begins with é, replace that with the letter s and you will occasionally get the English word, or an approximation thereof:

• Ex.:
  • étable --> stable (for horses)
  • école --> scole --> school
  • il étudie --> il studie --> he studies

• And to combine what you already know about the accent aigu, here is one last example:
  
  
  • étranglé (from étrangler) --> stranglé --> strangled

NB: This will not work with every word that begins with é.

Grave Accent - Accent grave

• à and ù

In the case of the letters à and ù, the grave accent(Fr. accent grave), is used to graphically distinguish one word from another.

without accent grave	with accent grave
a (3rd pers. sing of avoir, to have)	à (preposition, to, at, et al.)
la (definite article for feminine nouns)	là (there)
ou (conjunction, or)	où (where)

• è

Unlike à and ù, è is not used to distinguish words from one another. The è used for pronunciation. In careful speech, an unaccented e is pronounced /euh/, and in rapid speech is sometimes not pronounced at all. The è is pronounced like the letter e in pet.

Tonic Accent - L'accent tonique

In English, you stress certain syllables more than others. However in French, you pronounce each syllable evenly.