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French alphabet and characters
The French alphabet should display only the following characters. If your document is not showing correctly, then first check that the encoding for that program and font supports Romance languages.
Lower-case characters:
Upper-case characters
Diacritics and ligatures
French grammar rules
Nouns
French nouns have grammatical genders: either masculine or feminine. Nouns are not inflected for any other grammatical categories.
Verbs
French formatting rules
Date formats
| First day of the week | Monday |
| Working days | Monday to Friday |
| Short date format | yyyy-MM-dd as well as yyyy MM dd |
| e.g. 2016-03-24 or 2016 03 24 | |
| Long date format | d MMMM yyyy |
| e.g. 24 mars 2016 |
Numbers and measurements
French capitalisation usage
Should be capitalised
- People’s names.
- Geographical names (of countries, counties/states, cities etc.).
- Headings/titles and column/row headings should start with a capital letter unless a proper noun is featured.
- In most cases, only the first word in the name of an institution, organization, committee, etc. is capitalized unless a proper noun is featured.
- Do not capitalize the word following a colon unless the colon is at the end of a heading or the text following the colon is a complete quotation.
- The word “monsieur” or “madame” should be capitalized if it is used to communicate with the very person (mark of deference).
- When the word “monsieur” or “madame” is used to talk about the person in question to a third party, capitalization is no longer needed.
Should NOT be capitalised
Solutions for French
Stepping Stone provides translation and localisation services for French