2675: Does French Have a Plural? Apr 17, 2024

Like English, if you look at French spelling, the usual way of pluralizing a word is to add the letter -s. Since the end letters in French spelling are regularly not pronounced—the complex guidelines of which are the story for another day—it begs the question of whether French, phonetically, has a plural form. That is, does French allow for any sound to be a plural, thus not having a typical way to distinguish singular from plural aside from say, context or simply memorizing lots of forms without clear patterns?

The answer is of course French does have a standard way to pluralize, but French pluralization relies heavily, though not solely, on articles, like many other languages with certain features at most vestigial in the morphology of nouns, adjectives etc., like the German case system.

For instance, the book-turned-play Les Misérables is pronounced [le mizeʁabl] while the singular form would be Le Miserable [lə mizeʁabl]. Comparing the two, the only difference in pronunciation is the vowel in the article, here le or les, which is the most reliable way to tell even when there is a difference in the singular or plural noun’s pronunciation. This is why articles are used in French in contexts omitted in English because it gives information on grammatical number, as well as gender.