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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.

Latin alphabet (lower characters)

French grammar rules

French nouns have grammatical genders: either masculine or feminine. Nouns are not inflected for any other grammatical categories.

French formatting rules

First day of the weekMonday
Working daysMonday to Friday
Short date formatyyyy-MM-dd as well as yyyy MM dd
e.g. 2016-03-24 or 2016 03 24
Long date formatd MMMM yyyy
e.g. 24 mars 2016

French capitalisation usage

  • 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.

Solutions for French

Stepping Stone provides translation and localisation services for French