French

Conjugate Verbs

Facts

  • Language: French
  • Alternate names: Français
  • Language code: fra
  • Language family: Indo-European, Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Northwestern Shifted Romance, Gallo-Rhaetian, Langues d'oïl, Central Oil, Macro-French, Global French
  • Dialects: Gallo.
  • Number of speakers: 64858311
  • Script: Latin script

More information:

    Introduction

    French is a Romance language. It's a descendant of the Latin of the Roman Empire. Its development was also influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders.

    It is an official language in 29 countries, most of which form what is called in French La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations. It is an official language of all United Nations agencies and a large number of international organisations.

    French verb conjugation

    Verb

    French verbs are conjugated by isolating the stem of the verb and adding an ending. In the first and second conjugation classes, the stem is easily identifiable from the infinitive, and remains essentially constant throughout the paradigm. For example, the stem of parler ("speak") is parl- and the stem of finir ("finish") is fin-. In the third group, the relationship between the infinitive form and the stem is less transparent, and several distinct stems are needed to produce all the forms in the paradigm. For example, the verb boire ("drink") has the stems boi-, boiv-, bu-, and buv-.

    Phonetic conjugation: chanter [ʃɑ̃te]

    Phonetic conjugation of French verbs is easier than written conjugation; present singular of all verbs (with a only a few exceptions) has the same form.

    Present
    Written Phonetic (IPA)
    Sg.1 chante ʃɑ̃t
    Sg.2 chantes
    Sg.3 chante
    Pl.1 chantons ʃɑ̃tɔ̃
    Pl.2 chantez ʃɑ̃te
    Pl.3 chantent ʃɑ̃t

    Verblists

    Texts

    Paralleltexts

    Notes

    References