English Pronunciation for French Speakers

"I am 'ungry." "Sink about it." A ship that sounds like sheep. If French is your first language, you have probably heard at least one of these, and if you teach English in France, Belgium, Switzerland or Quebec, you hear all three every week.

None of them is random. Each one is a rule of French pronunciation applied to an English word, so each one has a fix. Catherine Walter, who wrote the chapter on French speakers in Swan and Smith's Learner English, sums up the starting point: French speakers "do not have great difficulty in perceiving or pronouncing most English consonants, but some of the vowel sounds present problems." She then names the larger issue: "the French and English systems of word stress and rhythm are very different, and this can lead to serious difficulties both in understanding and in producing spoken English."

This guide takes the difficult areas one at a time: what English does, what French does instead, and what to practise. The facts about French come from standard descriptions of its sound system, and the substitutions are documented ones (see Sources at the end). Teachers will find a section on what to drill first near the end.

This guide is also available in French as Prononciation anglaise : erreurs des francophones, and the English to IPA converter has a French edition with its own French-language pages.

About the transcriptions. Every table gives a US and a UK form from a pronunciation lexicon IPAtics maintains, printed exactly as it appears there. The US column puts a stress mark before the stressed syllable even in one-syllable words (heat is /ˈhit/) and marks no vowel length. The UK column marks length with ː and often leaves stress out. Both write the English r as /ɹ/.

h: written in French, never said

French writes an h in homme, hôtel and haricot and pronounces none of them. Standard French has no /h/ sound at all, so an English h has nowhere to land, and many French speakers drop it. In English that does more than add an accent, because it turns one word into another:

English /h/ is only breath. Nothing in the mouth touches: you push air through an open throat, already shaped for the vowel that comes next. Whisper "ha" as if you were fogging a mirror, then say heat with that breath in front of it. Hold your hand in front of your mouth: you should feel warm air on heat and almost none on eat.

Once you are saying h again, keep it for the words that have it. A few English words are written with an h nobody says, such as hour /ˈaʊɚ/ and honest /ˈɑnəst/, and adding one to eat or I is as confusing as dropping it from heat. The page on the /h/ sound has more words to practise with.

th: not s and z, not t and d

French has neither English th sound, so speakers borrow the nearest French one. Which one depends on where you learned French. Paradis and LaCharité, who compared how many languages adapt th, note that European French turns it into /s/ and /z/, while most languages, Canadian French among them, use /t/ and /d/. So think becomes "sink" in Paris and "tink" in Montreal.

The fix is a position, not a sound you have to discover. Put the tip of your tongue lightly between your teeth, or just behind the upper ones, and blow: that is /θ/. Add your voice and it is /ð/. If you hear a hiss, the tongue has slipped back to where French s lives; if you hear a t or a d, it has pressed against the teeth and stopped the air. Our guide to the two th sounds has more pairs, and the pages for /θ/ and /ð/ have audio.

Vowels French does not have

French has a rich vowel system of its own, which is part of the problem: several English vowels sit between French ones, and the ear files each under the nearest French vowel.

ship and sheep

French /i/, as in si and lit, is close to the vowel of sheep. English has a second, shorter and looser vowel, /ɪ/, which French does not use, so ship and sheep, fit and feet come out the same.

For /ɪ/, relax the tongue and drop it slightly, halfway from French i toward French é, and keep it short. For /ʊ/ in full and look, do the same from French ou: shorter, looser, lips only lightly rounded.

Quebec French speakers have a head start here. In Quebec, i and ou are pronounced lax in closed syllables, so petite has a vowel very like English /ɪ/. The vowel of ship is already in your mouth; the task is to use it in the right English words.

cat, cut and cart

French a covers ground that English splits three ways. In British English, cat, cut and cart each have a different vowel; American English keeps them apart too, with the r doing part of the work in cart.

For /æ/, start from French è, as in père, keep the tongue forward and drop the jaw further. For /ʌ/, say a short, relaxed a with the jaw only half open. For /ɑː/, open wide and pull the tongue back, as in a doctor's "say aah".

bird: keep the lips flat

The vowel of bird, word and first sounds close to French eu, and the lips tend to round, as they do in heure or peur. The English vowel is unrounded: the lips stay neutral. In American English the tongue also curls toward an r, which is why the US column writes it /ɝ/.

Check it in a mirror. If your lips push forward on first, you are saying French eu. Keep them as flat as for the schwa in about.

late and no: vowels that move

French é and o are pure vowels: the tongue holds still from start to finish. The English vowels in late and no move. Late glides from an é-like start toward /ɪ/; no glides toward /ʊ/. Said with the French pure vowels, they sound clipped and foreign, even when every consonant is right.

Say the French vowel, then let the tongue slide up as the sound ends: é-i, o-ou. Note the British start of no and home, /əʊ/: it begins in the middle of the mouth, not at French o. The pages for the vowels of day and show have audio.

Word stress and rhythm

This is the difference Walter warns can cause serious difficulties in understanding as well as in speaking. Said alone, a French word is stressed on its last pronounced syllable, and in connected speech the stress moves to the end of each group of words. Unstressed vowels keep their full quality. English gives each word a fixed stressed syllable, which can be first, last or anywhere between, and weakens most of the others, usually to the schwa /ə/.

Cognates are where this hurts most. The spelling matches French, so the French stress feels right, and in common words it is usually on the wrong syllable:

The UK entries leave stress unmarked, but the stress falls in the same place in both accents. Look at what happens to the vowels around it: problem ends in /ləm/, not "lème", chocolate loses a whole syllable, and so does comfortable in the UK column. Photograph and photography show that the stress can move inside one family of words and take the full vowel with it.

Small words weaken too. In a sentence, to, of, can, and and for are usually said with a schwa, quick and quiet, while the content words carry the beat. Our guide to the English schwa covers the reduced vowel and the page for /ə/ has audio.

When you learn a new word, learn its stress with it. Say the stressed syllable louder, longer and a little higher, and let the others go quick and weak.

The English r

French r is made at the back of the mouth, near the uvula. English r is made at the front: the tongue tip rises toward the roof of the mouth without touching it, and the lips round slightly. Hallé, Best and Levitt, who tested how French listeners hear American English approximants, found that the English r tends to sound to them close to a /w/. That is why red and wed can be hard to keep apart, in listening as well as speaking.

To find it, say a long "eeeee" and slowly curl the tongue tip up and back without letting it touch anything. The vowel colours into an r. For /w/, only the lips move.

The second question is when to say it at all. American English pronounces every written r. Standard British English drops it unless a vowel follows, so car is /kɑː/ and far is /fɑː/, and father ends in an r-coloured vowel in the US, /ˈfɑðɚ/, but in a plain schwa in the UK, /fɑːðə/. Pick one model and stay with it. Our comparison of American and British IPA lists the other differences.

j is not French j

The j of jam and the g of general begin with a /d/: English /dʒ/ is a stop followed by friction. French j in jour is friction only, /ʒ/, so jam can come out softer than an English listener expects.

The UK column writes the sound with a tie bar, /d͡ʒ/. It is the same sound as the US /dʒ/. Start with a French d, then release it straight into French j: d-jam. English uses /ʒ/ too, as the last two rows show, but rarely at the start of a word.

For teachers: what to drill first

Walter's overview says most English consonants give French speakers little difficulty, some vowels do, and stress and rhythm can cause serious difficulties. The order below follows that overview, with the few consonants that do cause trouble after the vowels.

1. Word stress, from the first lesson. Mark the stressed syllable on every new word on the board, and drill cognates as a set: students meet problem, family and interesting constantly, and the French stress makes them hard to recognise as well as to say.
2. The /ɪ/ and /iː/ pair, then cat, cut and cart. Start with listening: students who cannot hear the difference cannot practise it.
3. /h/. Dropping it changes words (heat and eat, hate and eight). Use the hand test, and correct an added h as consistently as a dropped one.
4. th, with the regional twist in mind. A class from France will need the /s/ and /z/ pairs; a class from Quebec will need the /t/ and /d/ ones.
5. The r and /dʒ/, with the pairs above.

Pair work with the minimal pairs from our list of English minimal pairs every learner confuses turns each item into a listening game: one student says a word, the other points to it.

A four-week plan

1. Week 1: stress. Take twenty words you use every day, check where the stress falls, and say them with one loud syllable and the rest quick.
2. Week 2: h and th. Hand in front of the mouth for /h/; tongue between the teeth for /θ/ and /ð/.
3. Week 3: the vowels. Ship and sheep first, then cat, cut and cart, then flat lips for bird.
4. Week 4: the gliding vowels and the r. Let late and no move, and keep the tongue tip off the roof of the mouth for r.

Record yourself each week and listen back. You cannot hear your own accent while you speak, but you can hear it on a recording. Our guide to shadowing turns that into a daily routine.

Trying it yourself

The tables cover the patterns; the words you meet every day are the practice. IPAtics shows the IPA for any text you select, in any app, with one hotkey, and plays the word, so you can check a vowel or a stress mark the moment you read it. To convert text in the browser without installing anything, paste it into the English to IPA converter and choose US or UK, and keep the interactive IPA chart open for the symbols. If you are new to the symbols themselves, start with how to read IPA.

Sources

• Walter, Catherine. "French speakers." In Michael Swan and Bernard Smith (eds.), Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and Other Problems, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 52–72. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667121.006. The source of the two quotations and of the priority given to stress and rhythm.
• Paradis, Carole and Darlene LaCharité. "The Influence of Attitude on the Treatment of Interdentals in Loanwords: Ill-performed Importations." Catalan Journal of Linguistics 11, 2012, pp. 97–126. doi.org/10.5565/rev/catjl.12. th as /s, z/ in European French and as /t, d/ in most languages.
• Hallé, Pierre A., Catherine T. Best and Andrea Levitt. "Phonetic vs. phonological influences on French listeners' perception of American English approximants." Journal of Phonetics 27(3), 1999, pp. 281–306. doi.org/10.1006/jpho.1999.0097. The English r heard as /w/-like.
• Wikipedia, "Non-native pronunciations of English", French section: the deleted /h/, th in France and Quebec, and ship and sheep.
• Pronunciation Studio, "French Speakers' English Pronunciation Errors": a London pronunciation school's list that adds rounded lips on vowels English says with neutral lips, the flat o where English has a diphthong, and the missing stop at the start of /dʒ/.
• Wikipedia, "French phonology" and "Quebec French phonology": the silent h, the vowels, final stress, the uvular r, and the lax i of Quebec petite.