Fontlex French
A font that hints at how French words are pronounced, for learners. The text box below holds
plain text, in French; the font draws the hints, in any app that renders color fonts. Copy the text and you get
the letters you typed.
Silent letters fade: the t of petit, the
ent of ils parlent. The letters of a nasal vowel are violet:
an, on, ain, un, so bon and bonne look different. A
schwa that speakers often drop (samedi, petit) is blue. A
liaison, a final consonant said before the next word's vowel, is bold and green,
with a tie under the space: les amis, nous avons, vont-ils. French has no word stress
to mark. The switches above the text turn one kind of hint off; in other apps they are the font's stylistic
sets (ss01 silent letters, ss02 schwas, ss04 nasal vowels, ss05 liaisons).
Where the hints come from
The pronunciations are Lexique 3.83's. Each word's spelling is aligned with its sounds, letter groups such as
eau, ou, an, gn and ill taken as one spelling of one sound, so a letter
that spells no sound is silent. The font lists the 30,000 most frequent words that Lexique has, about 94% of
running French text, and 129 compounds such as peut-être; any other word is drawn plain.
Liaison is drawn only where it is obligatory: after 42 determiners, pronouns, short prepositions and
numbers (les, nous, dans, deux), and in inversion; not before an h aspiré
(les héros) or onze. A word whose verb reading differs (le président, ils
président) takes its reading from the word before it, or from an invisible character right after it,
which a tagger can add: U+FE00 for the noun or adjective, U+FE01 for the verb (in the sample, after élèves
excellent).
How exact it is
| Text | Checked | Drawn as listed |
|---|
| Listed words and compounds, alone, capitalized, in capitals and in sentences; verb/noun pairs after cues; liaison triggers before vowels, h muet, h aspiré and consonants; inversions; unlisted words | 202,190 | 100.0% |
| This page's sample | 16 | 100.0% |
Each letter's glyph, and each space's or hyphen's tie, is compared with the lexicon's hint for
it, in HarfBuzz (Chrome, Firefox); Core Text (Safari) gives the same results.
How a font does it
OpenType passes. Right to left, each word's last letter gets a variant that says so; left to right, its first
letter. Then cue words and words that block liaison are marked; verb/noun pairs read their cue; liaison
triggers look one space ahead for a vowel or an h muet. Last, one rule per listed word, matching from a first
letter to a last one with case ignored, applies a hint to each marked letter.
Base font: Noto Sans and Noto Sans Bold (SIL Open Font License). Pronunciations: Lexique 3.83
(CC BY-SA 4.0); h aspiré: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0); word frequencies: wordfreq.