Silent letters

Il parle and ils parlent sound exactly the same: the s and the ent are both silent.

Silent letters are what make French spelling look unreadable, and they follow clearer rules than their reputation suggests. Paris ends in a silent s, petit (small) in a silent t, and the plural ils parlent (they speak) ends in three silent letters. Once you know which letters at the end of a word are usually silent, which are usually pronounced and what a final e does, you can read the great majority of words correctly. This unit covers those three rules and the most common exceptions.

Final consonants are usually silent

Most consonants at the end of a word are not pronounced: petit, grand (big), trop (too much), vous, nez (nose), prix (price), Paris. This includes the plural endings s and x, so le livre (the book) and les livres (the books) differ in sound only in the article, le versus les. When you listen to French, the little words in front of nouns carry much of the grammar that the ending carries in writing.

CaReFuL: c, r, f and l

Four consonants are often pronounced at the end of a word, and teachers group them under the word careful: c, r, f and l. You hear them in avec (with), sac (bag), parc, bonjour, car (because), soir (evening), neuf (nine, new), chef, sel (salt) and avril (April). The rule has two big exceptions. Verbs ending in er keep the r silent, as you saw in unit 3: parler, manger, aimer. So do many nouns and adjectives ending in er, such as premier (first), boulanger (baker) and escalier (stairs), while short words such as mer (sea), fer (iron) and hiver (winter) pronounce it. A few common words also drop the c or l: blanc (white), tabac, gentil (kind).

What a final e does

A final e is silent, but it changes the letter before it. A consonant followed by e is pronounced, because it is no longer at the end of the word. That is how you hear the difference between masculine and feminine adjectives: petit and petite (pe-tee and pe-teet), grand and grande, vert and verte (green), français and française. In speech the feminine is often marked only by a consonant you can hear, while the masculine stops on a vowel. Final es is silent too: the verb forms parles and parle sound the same, but the pronouns tu and je do not.

The silent ent of verbs

The verb ending ent marks they in the present tense, and it is completely silent: ils parlent, elles mangent, ils aiment are said as if they ended at parl, mang and aim. The same letters elsewhere are pronounced as a nasal vowel, in words such as moment, souvent (often), lentement (slowly) and client. The way to tell them apart is grammar, not spelling: after ils or elles, ent is a verb ending and is silent.