Learn French: Sur l'île, il n'y a pas de plages. - On the island, there are no beaches.

When a sentence is negative in French, words like un, une, and des change to de (or d'). Even though plages is plural, the positive phrase il y a des plages must change to il n'y a pas de plages in the negative.

Why are the negative words n' and pas placed around y a?

To make a verb negative in French, you put ne (or n') and pas around it. In the phrase il y a, the actual verb is a (from avoir, to have), and the pronoun y is attached right before it. The negative words have to hug that whole block together, giving us n'y a pas.

Does il n'y a pas de always mean 'there are no'?

It can mean 'there are no', 'there is no', or 'there isn't any' depending on the noun that comes next. If we used the singular form here and said il n'y a pas de plage, it would simply mean 'there is not a beach' or 'there is no beach'.

Why does île have a little hat on the letter 'i'?

That accent is called a circumflex. In many French words, it tells us that an 's' used to follow that vowel a long time ago. You can actually see the history of this because the English translation is 'isle' or 'island'!