Cyphernaut - French Alphabet

French is a Romance language that is related to Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. French has between 65 and 120 million native speakers and between 150 and 500 million total speakers worldwide. It the official language of France. It is also one of the official languages of over 29 countries worldwide including Switzerland, Belgium, Monaco, Luxembourg, Canada, Haiti, Martinique, French Polynesia, French Guinea, the Channel Islands, Lebanon, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mayotte, Seychelles and Madagascar. It is also an administrative language in many countries which were former French colonies like Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Laos and Cambodia.

This is a Flash guide for browsing the French alphabet. The French alphabet uses the Latin alphabet and consists of 21 consonants and 5 vowels. In the browser, vowels are indicated with a reddish tint. In French, the default stress is on the last syllable. If the last letter of a word is a consonant, it is not pronounced unless it is a C, F, L, or R. Also if the first letter of the next word is a vowel, the consonant is not pronounced. Only the e can have an acute accent mark (é) and is pronounced like ay in say. Vowels with grave accent marks (à, è, ù) often indicate differences between homophones like ou(or) and où(where) and are pronounced a little more openly than a regular vowel. Vowels with circumflex marks (â, ê, î, ô, û) are pronounced similarly to the vowels with grave accents (open sound) and in many words indicate a position where the letter s used to appear. For instance the word hôpital transformed over time from hospital and uses the ô instead of the os. Vowels with diaresis marks (ë, ï, ü) indicate that when two vowels appear together, the second vowel receives the diaresis mark and both must be pronounced like in the word naïve.