Reforms of French orthography
Encyclopedia
The orthography
of French
was already more or less fixed and, from a phonological
point of view, outdated when its lexicography
developed in the late 17th century and the Académie française
was mandated to establish an "official" prescriptive norm.
Still, there was already much debate at the time opposing the tenets of a traditional, etymological
orthography, and those of a reformed
, phonological transcription
of the language.
César-Pierre Richelet
chose the latter option when he published the first monolingual French dictionary
in 1680, but the Académie chose to adhere firmly to the tradition, "that distinguishes men of letters from ignoramuses and simple women", in the first edition of its dictionary
(1694).
It has since then accepted a few reforms and initiated, not always successfully, numerous others.
Several Renaissance humanists (working with publishers) proposed reforms in French orthography, the most famous being Jacques Peletier du Mans
who developed a phonemic-based spelling system and introduced new typographic signs (1550). Peletier continued to use his system in all his published works, but his reform was not followed.
The third (1740) and fourth (1762) editions
of the Académie dictionary were very progressive ones, changing the spelling of about half the words altogether.
Accents
, which had been in common use by printers
for a long time, were finally adopted by the Académie, and many mute consonant
s were dropped.
Many changes suggested in the fourth edition were later abandoned along with thousands of neologisms added to it.
Very importantly too, subsequent 18th century editions of the dictionary added the letters J
and V
to the French alphabet
in replacement of consonant I
and U
, fixing many cases of homography
.
. Most importantly, all OI digraph
s that represented /ɛ/ were changed to AI, thus changing the whole imperfect conjugation
of all verb
s. The borrowing
of connoisseur into English predates this change; the modern French spelling is connaisseur.
The spelling of some plural words the singular form of which ended in D and T was modified to reinsert this mute consonant, so as to bring the plural in morphological alignment with the singular. Only gent, gens retained the old form, because it was perceived that the singular and the plural had different meanings. The Académie had already tried to introduce a similar reform in 1694, but had given up with their dictionary's second edition.
's and Arsène Darmesteter
's, and later Paul Robert's
, the Académie gradually lost much of its prestige.
Hence, new reforms suggested in 1901, 1935, and 1975 were almost totally ignored, except for the replacement of apostrophes with hyphen
s in some cases of (potential) elision
in 1935.
Since the 1970s, though, calls for the modernisation of French orthography have grown stronger. In 1989, French prime minister Michel Rocard
appointed the Superior Council of the French language to simplify the orthography by regularising it.
states, published what it called the "orthographic rectifications" on 6 December 1990.
Those "rectifications", instead of changing individual spellings, published general rules or lists of modified words. In total, around 2000 words have seen their spelling changed, and French morphology
was also affected.
Elements of compound nouns
are fused together:
Loan
compounds are also fused together:
using normal rules, that is adding a final s or x, unless the modifier is an adjective (in which case both elements must agree), or the head is a determined noun
, or a proper noun:
Loanwords also have a regular plural:
in éCer (where C can be any consonant) change their é
to è
in the future
and conditional:
Additionally, verbs ending in e placed before an inverted
subject
"je" change their e to è instead of é:
Circumflex
accents are removed on i and u if they are not needed to distinguish between homographs. They are retained in the simple past
and subjunctive
of verbs:
Wherever accents are missing or wrong because of past error/omission or change of pronunciation, they are added or changed:
Accents are also added to loanwords where dictated by French pronunciation:
can currently be noted either by changing the e to è or by doubling the following l or t, depending on verbs. Only the first rule shall now be used except in appeler, jeter, and their derivatives
(which continue to use ll and tt).
This applies also when those verbs are nominalized using the suffix
-ement:
laissé followed by an infinitive never agrees with the object:
This is an alleged simplification of the rules governing the agreement as applied to a past participle followed by an infinitive. The participle fait already followed an identical rule.
This rule was also extended to suffixes in two cases, actually changing them into totally different morpheme
s altogether:
Isolated words were adjusted to follow older reform where they had been omitted:
Lastly, some words have simply seen their spelling simplified, or fixed when it was uncertain:
's defending them, or Josette Rey-Debove
's accepting a few (that have been added, as alternative spellings, to Le Robert
), they appeared to have become dead proposals.
As of 2004, though, an international institutional effort to revive them arose. Notably, a French-Belgian
-Swiss
association has been set up to promote reform. In July of the same year, Microsoft
announced that the French version of their applications would soon comply with the new spelling rules. On 23 March 2005 a version of Encarta
was published using the new spelling, and on 14 April an update of Microsoft Office
was offered.
Officially, French people
, including public workers, are free for an undetermined length of time to continue using the old spelling. The new spelling is "recommended", but both old and new are considered correct.
In Quebec
, the French Language Commission
, which was reluctant at first to apply what it prefers to call the "modernisation", because of the opposition it received in France, announced that it was now applying its rules to new borrowings and neologisms.
More and more publications are modernizing spelling. Le Forum, from the Université de Montréal, and Les Éditions Perce-Neige have adopted the new spelling.
The 2011 edition of the Dictionnaire Larousse incorporates all of the changes.
The 2009 edition of the Dictionnaire Le Robert
incorporates most of the changes. There are 6000 words that have both the traditional and alternative spellings.
As of 16 March 2009, several major Belgian publishing groups will apply the new spelling in their on-line publications.
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
of French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
was already more or less fixed and, from a phonological
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
point of view, outdated when its lexicography
Lexicography
Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....
developed in the late 17th century and the Académie française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
was mandated to establish an "official" prescriptive norm.
Still, there was already much debate at the time opposing the tenets of a traditional, etymological
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
orthography, and those of a reformed
Spelling reform
Many languages have undergone spelling reform, where a deliberate, often officially sanctioned or mandated, change to spelling takes place. Proposals for such reform are also common....
, phonological transcription
Transcription (linguistics)
Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...
of the language.
César-Pierre Richelet
César-Pierre Richelet
César-Pierre Richelet was a French grammarian and lexicographer, the editor of the first dictionary of the French language.-Life:...
chose the latter option when he published the first monolingual French dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
in 1680, but the Académie chose to adhere firmly to the tradition, "that distinguishes men of letters from ignoramuses and simple women", in the first edition of its dictionary
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française
The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française is the official dictionary of the French language.The Académie française is France's official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, although its recommendations carry no legal power...
(1694).
It has since then accepted a few reforms and initiated, not always successfully, numerous others.
16th century
Spelling and punctuation before the 16th century was highly erratic, but the introduction of printing in 1470 provoked the need for uniformity.Several Renaissance humanists (working with publishers) proposed reforms in French orthography, the most famous being Jacques Peletier du Mans
Jacques Peletier du Mans
Jacques Pelletier du Mans, also spelled Peletier, in Latin: Peletarius , was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance....
who developed a phonemic-based spelling system and introduced new typographic signs (1550). Peletier continued to use his system in all his published works, but his reform was not followed.
18th century
- L'Académie s'eſt donc vûe contrainte à faire dans cette nouvelle Edition, à ſon orthographe, pluſieurs changemens qu'elle n'avoit point jugé à propos d'adopter, lorſqu'elle donna l'Edition précédente. — Académie, 1740, using accents for the first time
The third (1740) and fourth (1762) editions
Version
Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique version names or unique version numbers to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category , these numbers are generally assigned in increasing order and correspond to new developments in the software...
of the Académie dictionary were very progressive ones, changing the spelling of about half the words altogether.
Accents
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
, which had been in common use by printers
Printing
Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....
for a long time, were finally adopted by the Académie, and many mute consonant
Silent letter
In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation...
s were dropped.
- estre → être (to be)
- monachal → monacal (monastic)
Many changes suggested in the fourth edition were later abandoned along with thousands of neologisms added to it.
Very importantly too, subsequent 18th century editions of the dictionary added the letters J
J
Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic...
and V
V
V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
to the French alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
in replacement of consonant I
I
I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...
and U
U
U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
, fixing many cases of homography
Homonym
In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that often but not necessarily share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings...
.
- uil → vil (vile)
19th century
Many changes were introduced in the sixth edition of the Académie dictionary (1835), mainly under the influence of VoltaireVoltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
. Most importantly, all OI digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
s that represented /ɛ/ were changed to AI, thus changing the whole imperfect conjugation
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
of all verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
s. The borrowing
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
of connoisseur into English predates this change; the modern French spelling is connaisseur.
- étois → étais (was)
The spelling of some plural words the singular form of which ended in D and T was modified to reinsert this mute consonant, so as to bring the plural in morphological alignment with the singular. Only gent, gens retained the old form, because it was perceived that the singular and the plural had different meanings. The Académie had already tried to introduce a similar reform in 1694, but had given up with their dictionary's second edition.
- parens → parents (relatives)
20th century
With important dictionaries published at the turn of 20th century, such as Émile Littré's, Pierre LaroussePierre Larousse
Pierre Athanase Larousse was a French grammarian, lexicographer and encyclopaedist. He published many of the outstanding educational and reference works of 19th-century France, including the 15 volume Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle.-Early life:Pierre Larousse was born in Toucy, where...
's and Arsène Darmesteter
Arsène Darmesteter
Arsène Darmesteter was a distinguished philologist and man of letters.He studied under Gaston Paris at the École des Hautes Etudes, and became professor of Old French language and literature at the Sorbonne. His Life of Words appeared in English in 1888...
's, and later Paul Robert's
Dictionnaires Le Robert
Dictionnaires Le Robert is a French publisher of dictionaries founded by Paul Robert. Its Petit Robert is often considered the authoritative single-volume dictionary of the French language.-Bilingual dictionaries:...
, the Académie gradually lost much of its prestige.
Hence, new reforms suggested in 1901, 1935, and 1975 were almost totally ignored, except for the replacement of apostrophes with hyphen
Hyphen
The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...
s in some cases of (potential) elision
Elision
Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
in 1935.
- grand'mère → grand-mère (grandmother)
Since the 1970s, though, calls for the modernisation of French orthography have grown stronger. In 1989, French prime minister Michel Rocard
Michel Rocard
Michel Rocard is a French politician, member of the Socialist Party . He served as Prime Minister under François Mitterrand from 1988 to 1991, during which he created the Revenu minimum d'insertion , a social minimum welfare program for indigents, and led the Matignon Accords regarding the status...
appointed the Superior Council of the French language to simplify the orthography by regularising it.
The rectifications of 1990
The Council, with the help of some Académie members and observers from FrancophoneLa Francophonie
Francophonie is an international organization of politics and governments with French as the mother or customary language, where a significant proportion of people are francophones , or where there is a notable affiliation with the French language or culture.Formally known as the Organisation...
states, published what it called the "orthographic rectifications" on 6 December 1990.
Those "rectifications", instead of changing individual spellings, published general rules or lists of modified words. In total, around 2000 words have seen their spelling changed, and French morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
was also affected.
Hyphens
Numerals are joined with hyphens:- sept cent mille trois cent vingt et un → sept-cent-mille-trois-cent-vingt-et-un (700,321).
Elements of compound nouns
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
are fused together:
- if one element is a verb: porte-monnaie → portemonnaie (wallet)
- in bahuvrihiBahuvrihiA bahuvrihi compound is a type of compound that denotes a referent by specifying a certain characteristic or quality the referent possesses. A bahuvrihi is exocentric, so that the compound is not a hyponym of its head...
compounds (where the individual sense of the elements has changed): sage-femme → sagefemme (midwife) - in onomatopoeias: coin coin → coincoin (quack).
Loan
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
compounds are also fused together:
- hot-dog → hotdog (hot dog).
Number
Compound nouns joined with hyphens (or fused) make their pluralPlural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
using normal rules, that is adding a final s or x, unless the modifier is an adjective (in which case both elements must agree), or the head is a determined noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
, or a proper noun:
- des pèse-lettre → des pèse-lettres (letter scales)
Loanwords also have a regular plural:
- lieder → lieds (songs)
Tréma
The tréma (known as diaeresis in English) indicating exceptionally that gu is not a digraph is to be placed on the u instead of on the following vowel. Also, such trémas are added to words where they were not previously used:- aiguë → aigüe (fem. acute)
- ciguë → cigüe (hemlock)
Accents
Verbs with their infinitiveInfinitive
In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives...
in éCer (where C can be any consonant) change their é
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
to è
Grave accent
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
in the future
Future tense
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
and conditional:
- je céderai → je cèderai (I shall give up)
Additionally, verbs ending in e placed before an inverted
Word order
In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...
subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
"je" change their e to è instead of é:
- cédé-je ? → cédè-je ? (am I giving up?)
Circumflex
Circumflex
The circumflex is a diacritic used in the written forms of many languages, and is also commonly used in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus —a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη...
accents are removed on i and u if they are not needed to distinguish between homographs. They are retained in the simple past
Preterite
The preterite is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place or were completed in the past...
and subjunctive
Subjunctive mood
In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in subordinate clauses to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred....
of verbs:
- mû → mu (driven), but qu'il mût unchanged (he must have driven), and
- dû (the past participle of the very common irregular verb devoir, or the noun created from this participle) is kept to make the distinction with du (the required contraction of de le, which means some when used as an undetermined masculine article, or means of the when used as a preposition).
Wherever accents are missing or wrong because of past error/omission or change of pronunciation, they are added or changed:
- receler → recéler (to receive – stolen goods)
- événement → évènement (event)
Accents are also added to loanwords where dictated by French pronunciation:
- diesel → diésel (diesel)
Schwa changing into open e
In verbs with an infinitive in -eler or -eter, the opening of the schwaSchwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
can currently be noted either by changing the e to è or by doubling the following l or t, depending on verbs. Only the first rule shall now be used except in appeler, jeter, and their derivatives
Derivation (linguistics)
In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...
(which continue to use ll and tt).
- j'étiquette → j'étiquète (I label)
This applies also when those verbs are nominalized using the suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
-ement:
- amoncellement → amoncèlement (pile)
Past participle agreement
Notwithstanding the normal rules (see French verbs), the past participleParticiple
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
laissé followed by an infinitive never agrees with the object:
- je les ai laissés partir → je les ai laissé partir (I let them go)
This is an alleged simplification of the rules governing the agreement as applied to a past participle followed by an infinitive. The participle fait already followed an identical rule.
Miscellaneous
Many phenomena were considered as "anomalies" and thus "corrected". Some "families" of words from the same root showing inconsistent spellings were uniformized on the model of the most usual word in the "family".- imbécillité → imbécilité (idiocy)
This rule was also extended to suffixes in two cases, actually changing them into totally different morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s altogether:
- cuissot → cuisseau (haunch)
- levraut → levreau (leveret)
Isolated words were adjusted to follow older reform where they had been omitted:
- douceâtre → douçâtre (sickly sweet)
- oignon → ognon (onion)
Lastly, some words have simply seen their spelling simplified, or fixed when it was uncertain:
- pagaïe/pagaille/pagaye → pagaille (mess)
- punch → ponch (punchPunch (drink)Punch is the term for a wide assortment of drinks, both non-alcoholic and alcoholic, generally containing fruit or fruit juice. The drink was introduced from India to England in the early seventeenth century; from there its use spread to other countries...
)
Application
These "rectifications" were supposed to be applied beginning in 1991 but, following a period of agitation and the publication of many books such as the Union of copy editors' attacking new rules one by one, André GoosseAndré Goosse
André Goosse is a Belgian grammarian born in 1926. The son-in-law of Maurice Grevisse, he took over editing and updating Grevisses' last book, Le Bon Usage. In 1988, he married the Belgian writer France Bastia...
's defending them, or Josette Rey-Debove
Josette Rey-Debove
Josette Rey-Debove, born November 16, 1929 in Calais , France and died February 22, 2005 in Senegal, was a lexicographer and semiologist, wife and colleague of Alain Rey...
's accepting a few (that have been added, as alternative spellings, to Le Robert
Dictionnaires Le Robert
Dictionnaires Le Robert is a French publisher of dictionaries founded by Paul Robert. Its Petit Robert is often considered the authoritative single-volume dictionary of the French language.-Bilingual dictionaries:...
), they appeared to have become dead proposals.
As of 2004, though, an international institutional effort to revive them arose. Notably, a French-Belgian
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
-Swiss
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
association has been set up to promote reform. In July of the same year, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
announced that the French version of their applications would soon comply with the new spelling rules. On 23 March 2005 a version of Encarta
Encarta
Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. , the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and...
was published using the new spelling, and on 14 April an update of Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
was offered.
Officially, French people
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
, including public workers, are free for an undetermined length of time to continue using the old spelling. The new spelling is "recommended", but both old and new are considered correct.
In Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
, the French Language Commission
Office québécois de la langue française
The Office québécois de la langue française is a public organization established on March 24, 1961 by the Liberal government of Jean Lesage...
, which was reluctant at first to apply what it prefers to call the "modernisation", because of the opposition it received in France, announced that it was now applying its rules to new borrowings and neologisms.
More and more publications are modernizing spelling. Le Forum, from the Université de Montréal, and Les Éditions Perce-Neige have adopted the new spelling.
The 2011 edition of the Dictionnaire Larousse incorporates all of the changes.
The 2009 edition of the Dictionnaire Le Robert
Dictionnaires Le Robert
Dictionnaires Le Robert is a French publisher of dictionaries founded by Paul Robert. Its Petit Robert is often considered the authoritative single-volume dictionary of the French language.-Bilingual dictionaries:...
incorporates most of the changes. There are 6000 words that have both the traditional and alternative spellings.
As of 16 March 2009, several major Belgian publishing groups will apply the new spelling in their on-line publications.
See also
- French orthographyFrench orthographyFrench orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language. It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100–1200 CE and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite...
- Use of the circumflex in FrenchUse of the circumflex in FrenchThe circumflex is one of the five diacritics used in the French language. It may be used atop the vowels a, e, i, o, and u.In French, the circumflex has three primary functions:...
External links
- http://www.orthographe-recommandee.info/ (in French)
- RENOUVO (Réseau pour la nouvelle orthographe du français, in French)
- À la découverte de la nouvelle orthographe (Communauté française de Belgique, in French)