The 16 French Vowels:
An Introduction

As you work to improve your pronunciation, minimizing the amount your mouth opens will give you more control of your lips.  The lips are vital in differentiating between an open and a closed vowel sound as well see in a moment.

The chart below shows the standard IPA phonetic symbol used to represent each vowel sound, and beside each vowel are examples of words that contain the sound with the specific letters that are used to spell the sound are bolded.

IPA

Examples

 

IPA

Examples

Vowels

a

ma, mal, date, quatre

 

œ

peur, sœur, bœuf, professeur

α

bas, mâle, pâle, pâtes

 

u

tout, coup, coûte, écoute

ә

de, petit, je

 

y

une, étude, dû,

e

parler, parlez, parlé, parlerai, c’est

 

Nasals

ε

tête, dette, père, parlais, et,  mais

 

i

si, île, chimie, stylo

 

ɑ̃

quand, chambre, vent, temps

o

mot, tôt, notre, chaud, beaux

 

ɔ̃

bon, ton, longue

ɔ

alors donner, nôtre, bonne

 

ɛ̃

vin, sympa, bien, impatient

ø

peu, lieu, veux, œufs

 

œ̃

un, brun, lundi, parfum

The four vowels with a tilde (˜) written above them to denote nasalization are pronounced just like their non-nasalized counterparts except that the air used to shape their sounds exits through the nasal instead of the oral cavity.  You can feel this if you pinch your nose closed and redirect the air through the nasal cavity as you pronounce a vowel.  The more your nasal cavity vibrates the more nasalized the vowel is.  You know you are doing this right if your nose begins to tickle or itch.  Different regional accents can be characterized in part by the amount of nasalization used.  Parisians are known for speaking with more nasalization than, say, Bretons.  Four our purposes, we will be working on acquiring a neutral French accent used by the media in France.  Later on, we will take a brief look at some of the accent variations in France and in other French speaking regions like Quebec and West Africa.

So now that we know the twelve French vowels and four nasals, how do go about pronouncing them accurately?  The diagram below depicts the different vowels sounds in relation to their location and mode of articulation.  The vowel sounds circled in red are the sounds that occur in French.  The rest are vowel sounds that occur in other languages.


Figure 3

As you can see, there are three main factors that attribute to a vowel’s sound.  The first factor is the location of articulation, or the place where the vowel sound is initially formed inside of the mouth.  As air passes through the oral cavity, it bounces off of a different section of the oral cavity causing it to vibrate which gives the vowel its initial shape.  Vowels can be formed in the front, middle, or back of the oral cavity.

The next factor that affects the shape of the vowel is how much room the sound has as it starts to exit the mouth.  There are four degrees of “openness”: open, open-mid, closed-mid, or closed.  Open-mid and closed-mid just means that the mouth is slightly less open or closed as the case may be.  As you may have noticed, the nasalized vowels are all open, which is ironic since little air actually exits through the mouth, thus there is little reason for it to be open.

The final factor that finishes off the shape of the vowel by limiting the amount of air that exits the mouth is the shape of the lips.  The lips can either be flat and wide like a smile or rounded like puckering up for a kiss.  If the lips are wide then the amount of force or air pressure needed to push the air out of the mouth is low.  If the lips are puckered, then less air can exit at any given time causing the pressure to build up inside the mouth requiring more force to push the air through the lips.  Vowels whose sound is forced through rounded lips are eloquently called rounded vowels.  These vowels have a certain tightness and rigidity about them that is characteristic of French pronunciation.