La Réforme Orthographique de 1990

In 1990, the Conseil supérieur de la langue française — with the formal backing of the Académie française — published a set of spelling recommendations called the rectifications orthographiques. The goal was modest: clean up a handful of inconsistencies that had survived centuries of editorial inertia. The result is, by now, one of the strangest situations in any major European orthography: two correct spellings exist side by side for several thousand words, and neither is fully dominant. A C1 learner needs to recognize both, understand the logic of the reform, and choose a personal policy.

This page lays out what changed, what didn't, where each spelling is used, and how to decide for yourself.

The status of the reform: officially correct, unevenly adopted

The 1990 reform is a set of recommendations, not a decree. The Académie française endorsed the changes and incorporated them into the ninth edition of its Dictionnaire (which began publication in 1992 and finished in 2024). The French Ministry of Education declared in 2008 that the reformed spellings are the reference for teaching, and in 2016 textbooks across France formally switched. Belgium and Quebec adopted the reform earlier and more enthusiastically.

In practice, however, adoption is patchy. Print publishing — newspapers, novels, academic books — still leans heavily traditional. Le Monde, Le Figaro, and most major publishing houses default to pre-reform spellings. School-age learners in France now grow up writing ile and cout, while their parents write île and coût, and both are correct.

What changed

The reform touched roughly 2,400 words — about 4% of the lexicon. The changes fall into six families.

1. The circumflex on i and u becomes optional

This is by far the most visible change and the one learners encounter most often. Before 1990, the circumflex on î and û was mandatory wherever French preserved it. After 1990, it is optional on these two letters, with one critical exception (see below).

The circumflex on â, ê, and ô is unaffected — those keep their accent. The reform reasoned that â and ê still mark a real sound difference for many speakers (open vs closed e, back vs front a), while î and û are purely etymological — they mark a long-lost s but carry no information about the modern pronunciation.

2. The critical exception: distinguishing homographs

The circumflex on i and u is kept wherever removing it would create ambiguity with another word. This is the exception every learner must memorize, because the reform did not simply abolish the accent.

There is a subtle wrinkle: only the forms that would clash are protected. Dû keeps its accent, but its feminine and plural forms — due, dus, dues — do not, because they don't collide with anything. This is why you will see dû and due in the same paragraph and both are correct.

3. Hyphens in compound words

The reform unified or removed hyphens in dozens of compounds. The general principle: when the parts have lost their independent meaning, write the word solid.

4. Hyphens in compound numbers: now mandatory everywhere

The traditional rule for hyphenating numbers under one hundred was a tangle: hyphenate consecutive digits (dix-sept) but use et without a hyphen for the -un compounds (vingt et un, cinquante et un). The reform replaced this with one simple rule: hyphenate all the elements of a compound number, full stop.

A side effect: under the reformed rule, mille takes a hyphen too when joined to another number — deux-mille-vingt-six (2026). Under the traditional rule, mille never takes a hyphen — deux mille vingt-six.

5. Plurals of compound nouns

Compound nouns of the type verb + noun (or preposition + noun) used to pluralize unpredictably. The reform regularizes them: the second element takes the plural when the meaning allows it, and the first element doesn't.

6. A few specific words rewritten

A handful of words were singled out and respelled to align with phonetics or to drop archaic features.

The nénufar/ognon changes are the most controversial — and the most ignored. Even reform-friendly publications often keep nénuphar and oignon simply because they look right.

Other corners of the reform

• Foreign borrowings are regularized to French phonetic rules: un revolver (no é) becomes un révolver; handball keeps its spelling but stress-pattern accents on Italian words like spaghettis are added (spaghéttis in some dictionaries — though this one didn't catch on).
• Accent grave instead of acute in many é
  • consonant + mute e sequences: je céderai → je cèderai, un événement → un évènement. The new grave matches the open /ɛ/ that French speakers actually produce.
• Trémas migrate to the vowel that is actually pronounced separately: aiguë (sharp, fem.) → aigüe (the ü shows that the u is heard). This is one of the least adopted of all reformed spellings.

Source-language comparison

For English speakers, the closest analogue is the American/British spelling split — color vs colour, theater vs theatre. Two things are different about French. First, the French reform is officially endorsed by the language's central institution, so neither spelling is "regional" or "informal"; both have full Académie backing. Second, the split runs inside a single national variety rather than between varieties — a French person in Paris in 2026 may use either spelling, often inconsistently within the same document.

There is no similar reform in Spanish (the RAE updates spelling continuously but quietly) or German (which had a sweeping reform in 1996, far more controversial than 1990). The French situation is unusually unsettled: the reform happened, was endorsed, was partially adopted, and then stalled.

How to choose

For a learner, here are the practical guidelines:

1. Be able to read both. This is non-negotiable. You will see île and ile, événement and évènement, oignon and ognon in the same week, often in the same paywall'd article.
2. For writing, pick one and stick to it. Mixing them within a document looks careless. If you're writing for a French academic context, traditional is still the safer default. For schoolwork in France post-2016, reformed is the official reference.
3. Memorize the protected pairs (dû/du, mûr/mur, sûr/sur, jeûne/jeune). These don't change in either system.
4. The keyboard wins most decisions. If your French keyboard layout makes î easy, you'll use it; if you're typing on a phone, the system will quietly drop it for you. Most native speakers' "choice" is just whichever their input method produces.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• The 1990 reform produced recommended spellings that sit alongside the traditional ones; both are correct.
• The headline change is the optional circumflex on i and u, with the critical exception of homograph pairs (dû, mûr, sûr, jeûne) where the circumflex is kept.
• Hyphens unified or removed in many compounds; all compound numbers now hyphenated under the reformed rule.
• A short list of specific words rewritten: nénufar, ognon, évènement, assoir, cèleri.
• Adoption is uneven: textbooks and Quebec lean reformed, French print media leans traditional, individuals mix freely.
• Practical policy: recognize both, pick one, be consistent.