Silent letters
Summary
French writes many letters that are not pronounced, especially final consonants and the letter e; they often resurface in liaison or mark grammar.
Explanation
A defining feature of French spelling is that many written letters are silent. Most final consonants are not pronounced, so petit, grand, trop, tabac and nez all end in a vowel sound (/pəti/, /ɡʁɑ̃/, /tʁo/, /taba/, /ne/). The plural -s and the third-person verb ending -ent are likewise silent: les chats /le ʃa/, ils parlent /il paʁl/ sounds exactly like the singular il parle.
A rough rule of thumb is that the consonants in the made-up word CaReFuL — c, r, f, l — are more often pronounced at the end of a word than other final consonants (lac, hiver, neuf, animal, sac, mer, chef, avril). The heuristic is only a tendency, not a law: it has many exceptions on both sides (the r of -er infinitives and of premier is silent, parler /paʁle/; the t of est is silent; but the s of fils and the c in donc are pronounced). Treat it as a first guess, then learn the exceptions.
The letter e is the great silent vowel. A final -e is normally not pronounced and instead serves to make the preceding consonant sound: contrast vert /vɛʁ/ with verte /vɛʁt/, or grand /ɡʁɑ̃/ with grande /ɡʁɑ̃d/. This is exactly how many feminine forms become audible. Inside a word an unstressed e (the so-called e muet or schwa /ə/) is often dropped in normal speech too: samedi sounds like /samdi/, and je ne sais pas can reduce to /ʒən sɛ pa/ or even /ʃsɛ pa/.
Silent letters are far from useless: they carry grammatical and lexical information that the ear recovers elsewhere. The silent plural -s distinguishes le chat from les chats only in the article and in liaison; silent endings keep verb persons apart in spelling; and silent consonants disambiguate homophones (vert / verre / vers / ver are all /vɛʁ/, sang / sans / cent / s'en are all /sɑ̃/). The spelling thus encodes meaning that pronunciation alone would lose.
Most importantly, a silent final consonant is only silent in isolation: it can resurface in liaison before a vowel. The silent s of petit-s or of les reappears as /z/ (les‿amis /lez‿ami/), the silent d of grand reappears as /t/ (un grand‿homme /ɡʁɑ̃t‿ɔm/), and the silent t of petit reappears in petit‿enfant /pəti.t‿ɑ̃fɑ̃/. The letter h is always silent in both its forms, but an aspirate h still blocks this linking. Knowing which letters are latent rather than truly absent is the bridge between spelling, liaison and a natural accent.
Examples
petit — small (Final t is silent: /pəti/, though it is pronounced in the feminine petite /pətit/.)
ils parlent — they speak (The -ent ending and the s are silent; sounds exactly like il parle: /il paʁl/.)
le nez et les yeux — the nose and the eyes (Silent z in nez /ne/; les yeux liaison gives /le.z‿jø/.)
un sac sur la mer — a bag on the sea (CaReFuL consonants pronounced: sac /sak/, mer /mɛʁ/, unlike silent final t/s elsewhere.)
les amis — the friends (Silent s of les resurfaces as /z/ in liaison before a vowel: /lez‿ami/.)
Common mistakes
Ils manges beaucoup.
Ils mangent beaucoup.
The third-person plural ending -ent is silent: ils mangent is pronounced exactly like ils mange would be, with no extra sound for -ent. Because they cannot hear it, learners sometimes write the singular-looking -es or drop the ending altogether, but the -ent spelling still has to be there to mark the plural verb form: ils mangent.
Related rules
silent-lettersspellingconsonantsorthography