French exhibits perhaps the most extensive phonetic changes from Latin of any of the Romance languages. Similar changes are seen in some of the northern Italian regional languages, such as Lombard or Ligurian. Most other Romance languages are significantly more conservative phonetically, with Spanish, Italian, and especially Sardinian showing the most conservatism, and Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and Occitan showing moderate conservatism.

French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language. Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for the wide differences between current spelling and pronunciation. Some of the most profound changes have been:

The loss of almost all final consonants. The occasional elision of final , which caused many newly-final consonants. The loss of the formerly strong stress that had characterized the language throughout much of its history and triggered many of the phonetic changes. Significant transformations in the pronunciation of vowels, especially nasal vowels.

Only some of the changes are reflected in the orthography, which generally corresponds to the pronunciation of c. 1100–1200 CE (the Old French period) rather than modern pronunciation.

This page documents the phonological history of French from a relatively technical standpoint. See also for a less technical introduction.

Overview

A profound change in very late spoken Latin (Vulgar Latin, the forerunner of all the Romance languages) was the restructuring of the vowel system of Classical Latin. Latin had thirteen distinct vowels: ten pure vowels (long and short versions of ), and three diphthongs ().In this article: Italics indicate Old French and other Romance language words; An *asterisk marks a conjectured or hypothetical form; Phonetic transcriptions appear , in the International Phonetic Alphabet. What happened to Vulgar Latin is set forth in the table.The changes occurred in the majority of Vulgar Latin, specifically the Italo-Western Romance area, which underlies the vast majority of Romance languages spoken in Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Andorra. However, different vowel changes occurred elsewhere, in the Vulgar Latin underlying modern Romanian, Sardinian, Corsican, and a few modern southern Italian varieties.

Essentially, the ten pure vowels were reduced at first to nine vowels in Proto-Romance. Then Italo-Western Romance shifted to , yielding seven vowels , and vowel length was no longer a distinguishing feature. The diphthongs and fell in with and , respectively. was retained, but various languages (including Old French) eventually turned it into after the original fell victim to further changes.

+ Development of French pronunciation over time Form("to sing") Latin Vulgar Latin1 Old French Modern French spelling pronunciation spelling pronunciation Infinitive Past Part. ) Gerund 1sg. indic. 2sg. indic. 3sg. indic. 1pl. indic.2 2pl. indic. 3pl. indic. 1sg. subj. 2sg. subj. 3sg. subj. 1pl. subj.2 2pl. subj. 3pl. subj. 2sg. impv. 2pl. impv.3

The complex but regular French sound changes have caused irregularities in the conjugation of Old French verbs, like stressed stems caused by historic diphthongization (amer, aim, aimes, aime, aiment, but amons, amez), or regular loss of certain phonemes (vivre, vif, vis, vit). Later in Modern French, these changes were limited to fewer irregular verbs. Modern French also had lost the class of rather unpredictable verbs (resulting from ejection of into the infinitive suffix , which still exists in some langues d'oïl), having been replaced by simple verbs plus instead, as in , but Old French → .

Vowel length became automatically determined by syllable structure, with stressed open syllables having long vowels and other syllables having short vowels. Furthermore, the stress on accented syllables became more pronounced in Vulgar Latin than in Classical Latin. That tended to cause unaccented syllables to become less distinct, while working further changes on the sounds of the accented syllables. That especially applied to the new long vowels, many of which broke into diphthongs but with different results in each daughter language.

Old French underwent more thorough alterations of its sound system than did the other Romance languages. Vowel breaking is observed to some extent in Spanish and Italian: Vulgar Latin "fire" (in Classical Latin, "hearth") becomes Italian and Spanish . In Old French, it went even further than in any other Romance language; of the seven vowels inherited from Vulgar Latin, only remained unchanged in stressed open syllables:

The sound of Latin short e, turning to in Proto-Romance, became in Old French: Latin , "honey" > OF The sound of Latin short o > Proto-Romance > OF , later : cor > cuor > cuer, "heart" Latin long ē and short i > Proto-Romance > OF ei: > , "to have"; this later becomes in many words, as in Latin long ō and short u > Proto-Romance > OF ou, later eu: > > , "flower" Latin a, ā > Proto-Romance > OF , probably through an intervening stage of ; > , "sea". That change also characterizes the Gallo-Italic languages of Northern Italy (cf. Bolognese ).

Furthermore, all instances of Latin long ū > Proto-Romance became , the lip-rounded sound that is written in Modern French. That occurred in both stressed and unstressed syllables, regardless of whether open or closed.

Latin did not share the fate of or ; Latin > OF , "gold": not *œur nor *our. Latin must have been retained at the time such changes were affecting Proto-Romance.

Changes affecting consonants were also quite pervasive in Old French. Old French shared with the rest of the Vulgar Latin world the loss of final . Old French also dropped many internal consonants when they followed the strongly stressed syllable; Latin > Proto-Romance > OF ; cf. Spanish ("stone").

+ Table of Old French outcomes of Latin vowels Letter ClassicalLatin VulgarLatin Proto-WesternRomance Early Old French(through early 12th c.) Later Old French(from late 12th c.) closed open closed opena ā ae e oe ē i ī au o ō u ū

During the early Old French period, the digraph was pronounced as a falling diphthong . It later shifted to become a rising diphthong . Most of the surviving Oïl languages maintain a pronunciation as , but Literary French adopted a dialectal pronunciation, . The doublet of and in modern French orthography demonstrates the mix of dialectal features.

In some contexts, became , still written in Modern French.

At some point during the Old French period, vowels with a following nasal consonant began to be nasalized. While the process of losing the final nasal consonant took place after the Old French period, the nasal vowels that characterize Modern French appeared during the period in question.

Table of vowel outcomes The following table shows the most important modern outcomes of Vulgar Latin vowels, starting from the seven-vowel system of Proto-Western Romance stressed syllables: . The vowels developed differently in different contexts, with the most important contexts being: "Open" syllables (followed by at most one consonant), where most of the vowels were diphthongized or otherwise modified. Syllables followed by a palatal consonant. An usually appeared before the palatal consonant, producing a diphthong, which subsequently evolved in complex ways. There were various palatal sources: Classical Latin (e.g. Found as "worse" in many 19th and 20th century editions, but was actually pronounced , with a short followed by a geminate ; writing the macron is a convention to mark the resulting syllable weight. "worse"); any consonant followed by a coming from Latin short or in hiatus (e.g. "bath", "palace"); or followed by or (e.g. "peace", "I think"); or followed by and preceded by , or (e.g. "wound"); or after a vowel in various sequences, such as (e.g. "night", < "old", "black"). Syllables preceded by a palatal consonant. An appeared after the palatal consonant, producing a rising diphthong. The palatal consonant could arise in any of the ways just described. In addition, it could stem from an earlier brought into contact with a following consonant by loss of the intervening vowel: e.g. > Proto-Romance > Gallo-Romance (loss of unstressed vowels) > Proto-French (palatalization) > Old French > "half". Nasal syllables (followed by an or ), where nasal vowels arose. Nasal syllables inhibited many of the changes that otherwise happened in open syllables; instead, vowels tended to be raised. Subsequently, the following or was deleted unless a vowel followed, and the nasal vowels were lowered; but when the or remained, the nasal quality was lost, with no lowering of the vowel. This produced significant alternations, such as masculine vs. feminine . Syllables closed by followed by another consonant. By Old French times, this was "debuccalized" into , which was subsequently lost, with a phonemic long vowel taking its place. These long vowels remained for centuries, and continued to be indicated by an , and later a circumflex, with alternations such as "chard" vs. (formerly ) "beast" (borrowed from ). Sometimes the length difference was accompanied by a difference in vowel quality, e.g. "bad" vs. "male" (Latin < ). Phonemic length disappeared from Parisian French by the 18th century, but survived regionally (now especially in Belgian French). Syllables closed by followed by another consonant (although the sequence -lla- was not affected). The vocalized to , producing a diphthong, which then developed in various ways. Syllables where two or more of the above conditions occurred simultaneously, which generally evolved in complex ways. Common examples are syllables followed by both a nasal and a palatal element (e.g. from Latin -neu-, -nea-, -nct-); open syllables preceded by a palatal (e.g. "wax"); syllables both preceded and followed by a palatal (e.g. "it lies"); syllables preceded by a palatal and followed by a nasal (e.g. "dog").

The developments in unstressed syllables were both simpler and less predictable. In Proto-Western Romance, there were only five vowels in unstressed syllables: , as low-mid vowels were raised to . These syllables were not subject to diphthongization and many of the other complex changes that affected stressed syllables. This produced many lexical and grammatical alternations between stressed and unstressed syllables. However, there was a strong tendency (especially beginning in the Middle French period, when the formerly strong stress accent was drastically weakened) to even out these alternations. In certain cases in verbal paradigms an unstressed variant was imported into stressed syllables, but mostly it was the other way around, with the result that in Modern French all of the numerous vowels can appear in unstressed syllables.

+ Table of modern outcomes of Vulgar Latin vowel combinations Gallo-Romance Context Proto-French Later Old French Modern FrenchWritten Example Vowels not followed by closed a > "part" open ; e; é > "sea", > > "loved" before Gallo-Romance or , combines with next element () to make a new diphthong, ou > Gallo-Romance > Old French + diminutive > "beech tree"; (< Gaulish) > > "mud" palatal + open ; ie; ié > Vulgar Latin > > Early Old French > Late Old French > "half"; > Old French > "dear" closed