What gives away a french speaker?

This video gives a really detailed account of how to speak English with a French accent. These are the defining things that will make someone notice that you are French https://youtu.be/2ce5G3oFEpM?si=lpBwuFJxEmfFrCdI

hon hon hon instead of ha ha ha

Putting spaces before these: : ; ! ? 

In Laurentian French >Canadian/Québécois French: Stressing the wrong syllable in otherwise correctly pronounced words. Pronouncing an 'h' where it isn't needed, and dropping the 'h' when it is needed.

Pronouncing i as ee. So witch would be weech in a french accent

Lots of things. The TH sound, usually pronounced as a z The S at the end of words, usually dropped And the H, also usually dropped

As someone who is conversational in French, it's hard to give you a good answer because to me, it's super obvious when a person is a native French speaker because they pronounce the English/French cognates like you would in French. Stupid becomes *stupide*, visit becomes *visite*, experience becomes *expérience* Of course the normal sound changes like nasalization of certain vowels, front rounding of certain vowels (as in tu or peu), uvular "r", omitting "h" sounds, "th" -> "z", changing vowel stress, etc

French

"For sure" is correct English but seems to be used a lot by the French people I've spoke with. Using articles in places that French has but English doesn't for example "he feels the pain".

**Their accent.** They've a distinctive one that's often characterized by a nasal voice and a rolling of the "r" sound.

Apart from all the pronunciation stuff, starting a sentence with “as a French” instead of “as a French *person*” is one I see a lot. Obviously giving away your nationality there, though. Overuse of Latinate verbs instead of phrasal verbs, which are more idiomatic in English, or just Latinate vocabulary in general. Also, use of false friends like *actual* and *eventual* in their French meaning is a big one too. Other continental Europeans make similar kinds of mistakes though, so probably not French-specific.

Francophones get confused about the difference between "since" and "for" in cases where they both get translated as depuis in French. - I have been in Australia **for** six years. - I have been in Australia **since** 2019. A lot of people have mentioned pronouncing "th" as /z/ but in my experience it’s way more common for them to pronounce it as /t/.

More comical but imitating the way French sounds always ends up like "uhhh, bleuff leuff leuff, hon hon hon". So, I'd say those sounds travel across into English and you still sound Bleuffy and fleuffy.

Struggling with the 'r' and 'th' sounds in "squirrel" "thorougĥ" can, but overall, in France they don't teach the stress on syllables within words. They teach oral english more or less without stress on a particular part of the word. That gives a continuous flat rhythm to their sentences. "I would know I'm frrench madame"

in irl? the accent lol

Pronouncing an r in the back of the throat, like a growl

A lot of French speakers have trouble shaking the habit of pronouncing In- and Im- words as they would in French. The way we would pronounce An and Am. You get pronunciations like ampor-tonce (importance) and when they say integrity you could swear they said antiquity. Even some fairly fluent speakers are nigh incomprehensible due to this simple issue. It’s because the correct I sound in those words doesn’t exist quite like that in French; it’s a bit like English speakers having trouble distinguishing the u sounds between dessous and dessus. You’re called upon to create a sound that doesn’t exist in your mother tongue, so you substitute one you know and it’s fairly close but sometimes it comes back to bite you.

English *th* \>>> "z" (for Continental French speakers) or "d" (for Canadian French speakers) English *h* \>>> dropped or (for Canadian French speakers) moved onto words that don't have it English *\[ɔ\]* as in "law" >>> something different (difficulty with that vowel) English "*idea"* \>>> *aɪˈdi* (missing final schwa sound, very common for Canadian French speakers for some reason)

Last summer I made a Frenchman really upset because I guessed he was French after couple of sentences. His grammar was impeccable, but the melody was distinctively French

Stressing every syllable equally, or close to equally. Even if their pronunciation is perfect, this feature tends to stick.

The French "R", every time.

For me it’s usually the the duffle bag full of baguettes that gives it away more than anything else

th becomes z Accent on the wrong part of the word Not pronouncing innitial H's Occasionaly the guttural R

There are lots of give aways: - French speakers don’t automatically distinguish between long/short vowels or lax/tense vowel pairs, or over-pronounce them. “Bin” and “been” both either sound the same or “been” is very long. - A tendency to nasalise vowels before n. - Difficulty with “th”, “h”, and particularly word final consonant clusters (e.g. in strengths) - intonation across a sentence tends to be a bit flatter than in English - In French it’s common to say short segments very quickly then have a filler of “ben”, “eeuh” etc, and this pattern gets copied in English - the English stress system of usually “unstressed”, “stressed” syllables gets lost As for grammar: - Over use of French style structures using “of” instead of using other forms (house of my mother instead of my mother’s house) - Use of nouns (particularly ones ending in -ion) where we would likely use verbs naturally - Over use of “the” - Using French derived words instead of Germanic words Because of the influence French has had on English, many of these are fine and grammatically correct but give English a very formal air (partly why French speakers are often considered intelligent/sexy as they’re just using normal French words or constructions that seem very elegant in English)

Usually the small things, as someone who speaks both English and French there are words that I am conditioned into pronouncing one way. Eg. Différent ( different ). Im assuming its the same both ways though. Obviously if you have a recognisable accent too.

"Th" sound pronunciation, uvular "R"

Mostly the accent. Things like dropping S at the ends of words, dropping H at the beginning of words (or sometimes *adding* Hs where they don't belong), and the very distinct French R. As far as word choice/grammar mistakes, I can think of many fairly common ones (e.g. using *actually* instead of *currently, who* for objects, gendered pronouns for objects, asking questions by simply changing the intonation of a statement, treating *hair* as plural, "he is a French") but I wouldn't call them giveaways of a French speaker, since they can exist for other languages too. One particularly idiosyncrasy of French people is prefacing every statement about themselves with a "me", ("Me I love skiing"). Oh, and I thought of another one, French speakers (at least those of France) love using the word "Anglo-Saxon" to refer to anything related to the English-speaking world. That seems to be a pretty distinctly French thing.

For me, there are three key pronunciation giveaways: * Pronouncing 'th' as 'z' (ze for the, wiz for with) * Not pronouncing the final s * Not pronouncing h in words such as home, hotel Here are a couple of humorous videos on the topic. [https://youtu.be/\_QKbf9peB30?si=g8OvHoXbVBheDCS8](https://youtu.be/_QKbf9peB30?si=g8OvHoXbVBheDCS8) [https://youtu.be/DxxAwDHgQhE?si=FArMYzNBWHQ9iCrg](https://youtu.be/DxxAwDHgQhE?si=FArMYzNBWHQ9iCrg)

The one every English speaker will notice is the ‘th’ sounds being pronounced as s or z. That’s how English speakers jokingly imitate a French accent: zee, zis, and zat for the, this, and that.

Just came here to say that the Z sounds that replaces the TH sound is one of my favourite qualities in a French accent. I find it incredibly cute.

Their h, r, and s's. But it 100% Depends on the age they learned English. My uncle speaks English, Spanish, and French and I can't detect anything other than a slightly off Nicaraguan accent. I'd not guess French tho.

The way a French speaker uptalks. They do it at the ends of most phrases, in my experience. It tends to sound? like this. As if they are asking a question? but usually only in the middle of sentences? and not just in regular questions? as we do in English. French is very consistent with its prosody, so French speakers tend to carry this habit into English as well.