Paste or type any French text below. The page reads it aloud, and for every word shows which letters are silent, which vowels are nasal, and where the words link together. Click any word in the text to hear just that word.
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A liaison sounds a normally-silent final consonant because the next word begins with a vowel. Some are required, some optional, and a few are forbidden.
| Spelling | Broad transcription | Syllables | Notes |
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If you have studied Spanish or Italian, unlearn this: French words do not carry a fixed stressed syllable. Stress is a property of the phrase, not the word — it falls on the last full syllable of a rhythmic group. Un petit chat is one group, stressed on chat. That is why this page shows you silent letters, nasal vowels and liaison instead of a "stressed syllable" column: French has none to show.
Most final consonants are silent: petit,
grand, français,
temps. The classic mnemonic is that
C, R, F, L tend to survive — think of the English word careful:
avec, mer, neuf,
seul. But -er and -ez endings are
/e/ (parler, parlez), and a final c falls silent
after a nasal vowel (blanc).
A final e is silent too, but it protects the consonant in front of
it: chose is /ʃoz/, not /ʃo/.
A vowel followed by n or m becomes nasal — the
n itself disappears — unless the n/m is doubled or
followed by another vowel. Compare bon /bɔ̃/ with bonne
/bɔn/.
There are four: /ɑ̃/ (temps), /ɛ̃/ (pain),
/ɔ̃/ (bon), /œ̃/ (brun). Most speakers in Paris now
merge /œ̃/ into /ɛ̃/, which is what the checkbox above controls.
Required after determiners, pronouns and short prepositions:
les‿amis /le.za.mi/, nous‿avons,
deux‿heures. The linking sound is not always the letter you see:
s and x link as /z/, and d links as
/t/ — un grand‿arbre sounds like gran-t-arbre.
Forbidden after et, and before an h aspiré — a small
set of words, mostly Germanic loans, whose silent h still blocks linking:
les héros, les haricots. Compare les hôtels, where the
h is mute and the liaison is required. There is no rule for which is which;
it must be learned word by word.
Spanish spelling is close to phonemic, so a rule engine can transcribe it almost
perfectly. French is not, so the transcription here is a good approximation, not an
authority. It handles the regular machinery — silent finals, e muet, nasal
vowels, -tion, -ill-, open and closed eu/o
— and keeps a small lexicon for words no rule can reach (femme
/fam/, monsieur /məsjø/, fils
/fis/, oignon /ɔɲɔ̃/).
One case needs context rather than spelling: a final -ent is nasal in a noun
(un client, un moment) but completely silent as a verb ending
(ils parlent = /paʁl/). The page resolves it by looking at whether the
previous word is ils or elles. Outside that pattern it guesses the noun.
The audio is unaffected by any of this — it comes from your system's French voice, not from these rules.