The French Alphabet: Letters & Spelling

Level: A1. Good news first: French and English share the same 26 letters. What changes is how you name each letter when you say it aloud, plus a handful of accent marks that sit on top of some vowels and under the letter c. Learn the names once and you can spell your own name, read out an email address, and sound out new words.

The same 26 letters, new names

French writes with the Latin alphabet, exactly the 26 letters you already know, A to Z. There are no extra letters — the accented forms like é and à are not counted as separate letters in the alphabet. The job of this page is the names: when you say the alphabet or spell a word out loud, the sounds are different from English.

A few letters cause most of the confusion for English speakers, because the names clash with English:

• g is “gé” (like the start of “Gérard”), while j is “ji” — the two are almost swapped compared with English.
• i is “ee” and e is “euh”, so they do not sound like their English names.
• w is “double vé” (literally “double v”), not “double u”.
• y is “i grec”, meaning “Greek i”.

The letter names

The accent marks

Accents are not decoration — they tell you how to read a letter, and sometimes change the word’s meaning. Five marks matter:

• accent aigu (´) only on e: é, a closed “ay” sound, as in café.
• accent grave (`) on e, a, u: è (open “eh”, as in mère), and on à and où mainly to separate meanings.
• accent circonflexe (ˆ) on any vowel: â ê î ô û, as in hôpital — often where an old s was dropped.
• tréma (¨) on e, i, u: it means “say this vowel separately”, as in Noël (no-EL).
• cédille (¸) only under c: ç makes a soft “s” sound before a, o, u, as in français.

How to say it

A few sounds in the letter names have no exact English match:

• u / “ew” — round your lips as if to whistle, then say “ee”. This is the vowel in tu and the letter name for u.
• e / “euh” — a soft, neutral sound like the “u” in “fur” without the r.
• r / “erre” — the French r is made at the back of the throat, a light gargle, not the English rolling or hard r.
• é versus è — é is tight and bright (“ay”), è is open and relaxed (“eh”); compare été (summer) with mère (mother).

Spelling and letters in action

Practice

Where to go next

Once you can name the letters, build real sounds in the French pronunciation overview, then start forming sentences with the verb être and browse the French grammar section. New to the course? Begin at Start Learning French Here.

Quiz