Today we’re looking at the word la fille which means both girl and daughter. The purpose of this lesson is to contrast the pronunciation of fille with two other words with double LLs: la famille (family) and la ville (city).
la fille
girl
Word origin
The Modern French feminine noun fille comes from fīlĭa (female child, young person) in Latin. Interestingly, fīlĭa in Latin is the feminine form of fīlĭus, or fils (son) in Modern French.
Pronunciation
The pronunciation of fille is [fij]. Do not pronounce the LL as in [fil] or “feel”. That would be wrong.
Example sentences
I purposely wrote this first sentence to contrast fille with ville (city). The LL in ville is pronounced: [vil] or “veel”.
Est-ce que la fille habite dans cette ville?
Does the girl live in this city?
For this next sentence, I purposely included famille as it also has a LL. Famille [famij] and fille rhyme. The LL has the slight y sound which is represented by the phonetic [j].
La famille a trois belles filles.
The family has three beautiful daughters.
For this last sentence, the pronunciation of fils (son) is [fis].
Julie a deux filles et un fils.
Julie has two daughters and one son.
Related lessons
Reference
