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The Handful of French Phrases That Change How You Are Treated

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View from the doorway of a small French bakery, staff turning toward the door with people waiting at the counter

View from the doorway of a small French bakery, staff turning toward the door with people waiting at the counter

In the 2023/24 school year, 99.6 per cent of French pupils in lower secondary school were learning English, and 99.1 per cent were still learning it in upper secondary. The EU averages were 97.6 and 89.5 per cent. Eurostat compiles those figures from national education authorities, so they count enrolment rather than ability, but they are enough to dispose of the most durable story visitors tell about France: that the woman behind the counter speaks perfectly good English and is declining to use it out of principle.

Now the second number, from Eurostat's 2022 Adult Education Survey. Start with what school leaves behind. Some 22.6 per cent of French adults aged 25 to 64 report no foreign language at all, which is better than the EU figure of 25.3 per cent and still means that close to a quarter of the country came out the far end of near-universal English lessons with nothing. Among the French adults who do know at least one foreign language, 50.5 per cent rate their strongest one at basic level. Across the EU as a whole that share is 40.5 per cent. Only 24.5 per cent of French adults with a foreign language describe themselves as proficient in it, against 27.6 per cent EU-wide. This is self-assessment, with all the modesty and bravado that implies. The shape is still clear. Almost everyone in France has sat through years of English. Half of those who came out of school with any foreign language at all think what they have is thin.

Which reframes the whole encounter. The shopkeeper who goes stiff when you open in English is rarely sitting on a fluency she has decided to withhold. She is being asked, without warning and in front of a queue, to work at the edge of a skill she does not rate. The eight phrases below will not make you sound French, and they are not trying to. They do something more useful: they move a share of the effort back onto you, visibly, in the first three seconds.

Bonjour is a threshold

The Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne, a French-language school that has been explaining this to foreign students since 1919, puts it in one line: bonjour is not optional, it is a threshold. (The name is worth a footnote. The CCFS depends on the fondation Robert-de-Sorbon, not on Sorbonne University, and what follows is a language school's house guidance rather than a scholarly finding.) Walking into a bakery, a doctor's waiting room or a lift without saying it amounts to denying that anyone else is there. The omission is registered instantly, and it is judged.

The important part is the sequencing. The greeting precedes the request, always. Ordering a coffee without bonjour is a register error, and the school's guidance says plainly that it can degrade the quality of the exchange that follows. This is the mechanism behind every anecdote about rude French service. The visitor opens with the transaction. The other person hears someone who has skipped the part where two humans acknowledge each other, and responds to that, and the visitor concludes that the French are cold.

Say it out loud, aimed at the room rather than muttered at the floor. In a small shop with three customers already inside, it goes to all of them. Bonjour runs from morning until late afternoon; bonsoir takes over from around six in the evening, with local variation, so if you get it wrong at half past five nobody will die. Leaving reverses the ritual: au revoir, or bonne journée, closes the loop and confirms that the interaction happened.

A French administrative form showing Monsieur and Madame tick boxes, with a pen lying across it

The word after bonjour

Attach madame or monsieur. The CCFS is blunt about this: in formal interactions the title is systematic, and it functions as an act of recognition rather than as an archaism. Extend it to the ticket window and the pharmacy counter anyway. Nobody in France has ever been irritated by an excess of madame.

There is a trap here that phrasebooks have been slow to clear. On 21 February 2012 the French Prime Minister issued circular 5575/SG, which orders state administrations to strike from their forms and correspondence, in the circular's own list, "Mademoiselle, nom de jeune fille, nom patronymique, nom d'épouse et nom d'époux". The reasoning was blunt: Madame and Mademoiselle are not elements of civil status, and Madame should be preferred as the direct equivalent of Monsieur, which tells you nothing about whether a man is married. An association calling itself Libérez les Mademoiselles took the circular to the Conseil d'État. On 26 December 2012 the court rejected the challenge, in a decision published in the Lebon reports.

Two honest qualifications. The circular binds administrations, not private citizens, so it did not outlaw the word; and it survives in ordinary speech, including from people being perfectly friendly. But it stopped being the neutral default in 2012, and a foreign visitor guessing at a stranger's marital status from her appearance is playing a game with no upside. Madame, to any adult woman, always.

Vous, and why one académicien is worried about it

Use vous. Not as a formality you might relax after a pleasant minute, but as the setting for the entire encounter with anyone you have just met. French convention holds that you vouvoie a first-time acquaintance, young people meeting informally aside, along with anyone senior to you in a hierarchy until tu is explicitly offered, and older people as a matter of generational deference. Tu is for family, close friends, colleagues after a tacit or stated agreement, and children.

The switch happens at a marked moment, with its own formula, and it is normally proposed by the older or more senior party: on pourrait peut-être se tutoyer. Reaching for tu before that is offered reads as misplaced familiarity. It is also one of the few errors a foreigner can make that native speakers do not automatically forgive as charming, because it is not a mistake of grammar, it is a claim about the relationship.

For what it is worth, the pressure is running the other way, and an académicien has said so in the Académie française's own Bloc-notes. In a signed column of 6 June 2013, the writer Frédéric Vitoux mourned the retreat of vous in everyday conversation and described the imposition of tu as a form of violence: the tutoyeur decides for both parties how close they are. He also relays the standard etymology, that the plural address descends from Diocletian's divided empire, where a sovereign speaking for his three co-rulers used nos and was answered with vos. This is one man writing under his own name rather than a position of the institution, and he signs off by coining tutoielitarisme and pronouncing it a totalitarisme, which gives you the temperature. Whether or not the history holds up, the point survives. Vous is a measuring instrument, and handing it over is a decision that belongs to the other person.

A waiter carrying a tray between tables on a French cafe terrace at dusk

The eight

  1. Bonjour, madame. Bonjour, monsieur. The entry ticket. Nothing else in this list works if you skip it.
  2. Excusez-moi de vous déranger. Excuse me for disturbing you. The correct way to open a request on a stranger in the street, or on a member of staff who is doing something else. It concedes, in advance, that you are the interruption.
  3. Pardon. Shorter, and it does the physical work: squeezing past someone on the métro, reaching across them, stepping on a foot. Formal guidance treats the two as interchangeable openers for any interruption; in practice they split, and the split is worth having. Pardon moves a body, excusez-moi opens a conversation.
  4. S'il vous plaît. Attaches to every request, however small. It is also how you get a waiter's attention, said quietly with eye contact as they pass. Never the raised hand, and never, under any circumstances, the word garçon.
  5. Je voudrais... I would like. The conditional does the work here. Je veux, I want, is grammatically fine and lands like a demand. Je voudrais un café, s'il vous plaît is the whole of café French.
  6. Est-ce que vous parlez anglais ? Asked in French, after bonjour, never as your opening line. Asked first, it is a request that the other person do all the work before you have done any. Asked fourth, it is a reasonable question between two people who have already established that they are being polite to each other.
  7. Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas très bien français. The exit. More on this below.
  8. Merci. Au revoir. Bonne journée. The close. Merci draws je vous en prie or de rien, which shuts the loop cleanly. Say all three on the way out even if the transaction went badly.

How to leave a conversation you can no longer hold

This is the part the phrasebooks skip, and it is where most encounters actually break. You do the greeting, you get your question out, and the answer arrives at full speed with three clauses and a place name you have never heard. The instinct is to freeze, then switch to English at higher volume. Both are bad.

The functional move is to name your own limit before the other person has to. Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas très bien français. That does three things at once: it apologises, it explains, and, crucially, it hands the choice back. Some people will slow down. Some will produce the English they were not sure they had. Some will call over a colleague. All three outcomes beat the version where you simply stop responding and they are left guessing whether you are confused or offended.

Two supporting lines are worth memorising alongside it. Pouvez-vous répéter, s'il vous plaît, and plus lentement, s'il vous plaît. Asking someone to repeat themselves more slowly is a small compliment: it says you expect to understand on the second pass. And when numbers are involved, prices, platform numbers, house numbers, ask for them written down. Numbers are the first thing to fall apart in a second language and the easiest thing to fix.

One thing not to do: apologise at length. Je suis désolé once, then get on with it. A drawn-out apology puts the other person in the position of having to reassure you, which is more work than the original question.

What this does not cover

These are French conventions in France. Do not carry them wholesale to Belgium, Switzerland or Quebec, where the same language is spoken under different social arrangements and about which nothing here is a claim. Even within France, the details wobble. The evening handover from bonjour to bonsoir moves with local habit. So does the bise, the cheek kiss, which by the account most often repeated runs to two in the Paris region, three in the Provençal south and four in pockets of the Loir-et-Cher. Treat that map as folklore with a following wind rather than as survey data; the school's own page, having drawn it, then misspells the département. In any case the bise is not yours to initiate with someone you have just met. A handshake, or nothing at all, is the correct answer there.

None of the eight phrases will disguise you. Within a syllable of bonjour, everybody knows. That was never the point of them. The numbers at the top of this piece describe a country where the person serving you has almost certainly studied your language, probably does not think much of the version she retained, and will nonetheless usually try. The phrases are how you go first.

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