Le système des déterminants : tableaux complets et prononciation

Unité GR-06 · campagne 1 · la carte complète, avant les règles une à une.

A French noun almost never travels alone — a determiner walks in front of it, and the determiner changes shape twice: with number (singular/plural) and with the first sound of the noun (vowel vs consonant). The other GR units drill the rules one by one; this page is the reference map you come back to. Bookmark it.

What the forms mean

This page tabulates the forms. What each family means — why un introduces and le refers back, why du measures what un counts, why French will not leave a noun bare — is on its own page: Qu'est-ce qu'un déterminant ? Le sens de chaque famille. If the choice between un, le and du still feels like guessing, read that one first; the tables below then become spellings of a decision you already know how to make.

Masculine noun — consonant start (train) vs vowel start (avion)

The ‿ marks an obligatory liaison and the letter you actually hear: un‿avion sounds [n], les‿avions and every plural determiner sound [z], cet avion sounds [t]. That [z] is often the only audible mark of the plural — the noun itself (avion/avions) sounds identical.

Feminine noun — consonant start (voiture) vs vowel start (école)

Two traps live in the vowel column:

1. mon école, never "ma école" — before a vowel-initial feminine noun, the possessive borrows the masculine form (mon/ton/son) purely for the sound. The noun stays feminine: mon école est grande.
2. cet avion, never "ce avion" — the demonstrative grows a [t] before a vowel; feminine cette already ends in [t] and never changes.

And the one rule that cuts across every row: under negation or a quantity word, the indefinite/partitive series collapses to de/d' (pas d'avion, beaucoup d'avions) — while the definite series (le/la/les) and the demonstrative/ possessive never reduce (je n'aime pas le train, je ne prends pas cet avion).

Going further

Why the rule exists. The vowel-column changes all serve one purpose: these determiners avoid two vowels colliding across words. Ma école would put [a] against [e]; mon‿école and cet‿avion put a consonant between them — the same job English gives to an in an apple.

Minimal pairs. One change between the two sentences, and what it does:

The errors to watch.

From Russian and English. Russian has one rule of the same kind: о книге but об армии — a consonant slips in so that two vowels do not meet. French mon amie, cet avion do that job, and l'école drops the vowel instead. English has its own cousin: a apple → an apple.

The complete rule. Mon / ton / son and cet replace ma / ta / sa and ce before any vowel sound, including an h muet (mon histoire, cet homme). An h aspiré counts as a consonant: ma hache, ce héros, le haricot, les haricots without liaison. A dictionary marks the h aspiré, usually with an asterisk.

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