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French phonology displays variation due to regional dialects. This article aims at displaying a complete overview of French normal and possible phonemes and their most common allophones.

Vowel quantity
Certain dialects, notably Quebec French and Belgian French, make a distinction between long and short vowels, in final syllables only. The occurrence of long vowels can vary widely among dialects. Generally, the following vowels are long: Other vowels are long due to compensatory lengthening: in syllables where a consonant in the syllable coda has been lost, the vowel becomes long. The overwhelming majority of these cases are due to the loss of [s]:
 * ,, and , when followed by one or more consonants, e.g. base, ; flamme,
 * other vowels followed by one of the voiced fricatives, e.g. sœur, ; brave,
 * nasal vowels followed by one or more consonants, e.g. romance, ; emprunte,
 * Old French > Modern French  "maître"
 * Old French > Modern French  "bête"

Consonants
Where symbols for consonants occur in pairs, the left represents the voiceless consonant and the right represents the voiced consonant.

Notes:
 * , and  are never aspirated in French. The designation of, , and  as dental has been disputed. See Dental consonant.
 * 1) The grapheme r allows a wide range of realizations in French., , , , and will all be recognized as "r", but most of them will be considered dialectal. For example,  is considered typical of a Parisian accent, while  is sometimes found in southern France, less and less in the Montréal area and in Cajun French.
 * 2) The velar nasal is not a native phoneme of French, but occurs in loan words such as parking or camping. Many speakers (mostly old people and those who are not accustomed to this foreign sound) replace it with a prenasalized sequence. In Quebec French,  is pronounced, so these loanwords rhyme with ligne and signe. The velar nasal is also heard in the accent of the city of Marseille after nasal vowels, e.g. malin,.
 * 3) is slowly disappearing in favor of a  sequence in some dialects
 * 4) and  in French are mostly allophones of  and  before a vowel. The only case where  contrasts with  is when there is a morphemic boundary, causing some forms of verbs ending in -oua ( or ) such as loua ("he rented") and noua ("he knotted, he tied") to contrast with words ending with the oi  diphthong, such as loi ("law"), and noix ("nut").

Vowel-lengthening consonants
The consonants  cause automatic lengthening of the previous vowels. While this is not phonemic in itself, it might cause vowels to change quality in dialects where short and long vowels are of different qualities.

Sounds
The close front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is i.

Features

 * Its vowel height is close, which means the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.
 * Its vowel backness is front, which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.
 * Its vowel roundedness is unrounded, which means that the lips are spread.

Occurs in
The vowel [i] is a very common vowel. It occurs phonemically in almost all languages with three or more vowels, and phonetically it probably occurs in every language. For example:


 * French: fini, "finished"