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Phonological history of French


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 and especially Italian showing the most conservatism, and Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan and Romanian 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:

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

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

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 a, e, i, o, v) and three diphthongs (ae, oe, av). What happened to Vulgar Latin is set forth in the table. Essentially, the ten pure vowels were reduced to the seven vowels /a ɛ e i ɔ o u/, and vowel length was no longer a distinguishing feature. The diphthongs ae and oe fell in with /ɛ/ and /e/, respectively. av was retained, but various languages (including Old French) eventually turned it into /ɔ/ after the original /ɔ/ fell victim to further changes.


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