Appendix:French spelling reforms of 1990

The French spelling reforms of 1990 were proposed by the and approved by the  on May 3, 1990. Some are now more prevalent than the still correct pre-1990 spellings, but many less. On Wiktionary, French words with revised spellings are usually treated as alternative spellings, while the traditional spelling is the main article.

The Académie française of France controls the de jure form of the French language in France, while outside of France, its strictures are not mandated. Instead local versions of that body may choose to follow or ignore its mandates, leading to different de jure forms of the French language.

Numbers
Numbers are to be written with hyphens instead of spaces, to reduce ambiguity (particularly where fractions are involved):

The nouns, etc. are not hyphenated:  (12&thinsp;345&thinsp;654&thinsp;321).

Words with hyphens
Many words with hyphens did not change in the plural, for example,. The reform has all compound words pluralized according to the normal French rules of pluralization; however, words that contain singular articles (such as ) or capital letters (such as ) remain invariable.

Furthermore, hyphenated words that begin with or, are onomatopoeic, are borrowed from foreign languages, or contain one or more words that do not occur independently lose their hyphens altogether.

Plurals and diacritics of loanwords
Some French words borrowed from other languages retain their non-French plurals, such as, , or did not have a diacritic that would be used if the word were a native French word. The reform gives all loanwords French plurals (usually a single -s) and diacritics.

Acute and grave accents on an e
The spelling reforms also affect accents. When an is pronounced  rather than, it should be represented by  instead. Exceptions are: the prefixes and  when they precede more than one consonant sound, and the first é in  and.

Circumflexes
Circumflexes in French generally stem from 🇨🇬 and 🇨🇬 roots where an s has been elided. For example, is from the Old French. However the circumflex does not change the pronunciation of most words containing it when used on the letters i and u, making it “obsolete”, according to the reforms. Therefore it has been removed from nearly all words that contain it. It is kept in cases where it does indicate different pronunciation, as in (pronounced differently from ), and where it distinguishes between two homophones: that is, the masculine singular (but not the feminine or plurals) of the adjectives, , and  (to distinguish them from the words , , and ), and the forms of the verb  that could be mistaken for parallel forms of the verb  without a circumflex. It is also retained in the very common verb and in the past historic (first and second persons plural) and past subjunctive (third person singular), by analogy with verbs of the first conjugation that contain â (which is still pronounced differently from a in some accents).

Use of diaereses
In sequences such as -gue- and -gui-, a is placed on the  and not on any other letter. This is to indicate the correct pronunciation in a more intuitive fashion:

As eu in French normally represents or, a diaeresis is added to the following words, to indicate the pronunciation:

Verbs ending with -eler and -eter
Except for, , and their compounds and derivatives, verbs with infinitives in -eler and -eter take a on the e (è) instead of doubling the consonant before a mute e. The same rules apply to terms derived from these verbs:

The verb is complicated by the new rules regarding é and è:

Words ending with -illier and -illière
The last i is dropped as it is not pronounced. The exceptions are names of plants, such as, so as to preserve the suffix.

Words ending in -olle and -otter
Words ending in -olle and verbs ending in -otter now only require one consonant, as dropping the l or the t does not change the pronunciation. Exceptions are, , , and terms derived from nouns ending in -otte, such as and , ,.

Past participle of laisser
The past participle of becomes invariable (no feminine or plural forms) when followed by an infinitive.

Miscellaneous reforms
To prevent anomalies between related words, and to align spelling more closely with actual pronunciation, the following additional changes have been made. The new spellings also apply to the derivatives of these words. In many cases the "new" spellings were already in use as alternatives before the reforms officialized them.