Major Differences Between the French and English Languages

sign being translated from French to English — Nazar Abbas Photography / Getty Images

Updated on February 21, 2020

The French and English languages are related in a sense, because French is a Romance language descended from Latin with German and English influences, while English is a Germanic language with Latin and French influences. Thus, they share some similarities, most notably the same alphabet and a number of true cognates.

Perhaps more important, though, are the many differences, both major and minor, between the two languages, such as a long list of false cognates—words that look similar but have vastly different meanings. French and English have hundreds of cognates (words that look and/or are pronounced alike in the two languages), including true cognates with similar meanings, false cognates with different meanings, and semi-false cognates—some similar and some with different meanings.

But it seems that false cognates confound us most. For instance, assister in French nearly always means "to attend" something, while "assist" in English means "to help." And formidable in French means "great" or "terrific," nearly the polar opposite of the English meaning, which is "dreadful" or "fearsome."

Here are some brief explanations of the major differences between French and English, with links to further information.

A Comparison of Characteristics

	French	English
accents	in many words	only in foreign words
agreement	yes	no
articles	more common	less common
capitalization	less common	more common
conjugations	different for each grammatical person	different only for third-person singular
contractions	required	optional and informal
gender	for all nouns and most pronouns	only for personal pronouns
liaisons	yes	no
negation	two words	one word
prepositions	certain verbs require prepositions	many phrasal verbs
rhythm	stress at the end of each rhythmic group	stressed syllable in each word, plus stress on an important word
Roman numerals	more common, often ordinal	less common, rarely ordinal
subjunctive	common	rare

Other differences between French and English

false cognates	Words that look alike but don't necessarily mean the same thing
pronunciation	Many differences, particularly vowels and the letter R
punctuation	Different uses and spacing
silent letters	Many in both, but not the same letters
singulars and plurals	The grammatical number of nouns may be different.
spelling equivalents	Patterns in spelling differ in the two languages.
word order	Adjectives, adverbs, negation plus pronouns may cause problems.

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Team, ThoughtCo. "Major Differences Between the French and English Languages." ThoughtCo, Dec. 6, 2021, thoughtco.com/differences-between-french-and-english-1369367. Team, ThoughtCo. (2021, December 6). Major Differences Between the French and English Languages. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/differences-between-french-and-english-1369367 Team, ThoughtCo. "Major Differences Between the French and English Languages." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/differences-between-french-and-english-1369367 (accessed June 7, 2023).