French · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "appeler" in French?

Q: How do you pronounce appeler in French?

appeler is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a.ple/. It means “to call.” ah-PLAY, usually just two syllables — that middle "e" drops out in normal speech. The "-er" is a bare "ay".

ah-PLAY, usually just two syllables — that middle "e" drops out in normal speech. The "-er" is a bare "ay".

appeler /a.ple/

Two spoken beats, a-PLER, with the weight at the end. In the conjugated forms the spelling doubles the "l" precisely to keep that vowel open — "j'appelle" is /ʒa.pɛl/, three sounds where the infinitive has a dropped schwa.

Listen: appeler

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Sound it out

a A short open "ah", unstressed.

pp A single unaspirated "p" sound. The doubled letter is a spelling convention, not an instruction to hold the consonant.

e A schwa that most speakers delete entirely, turning three written syllables into two spoken ones: a-PLER rather than a-pe-LER.

ler A light "l" plus the -er infinitive ending, a closed "ay" with a silent "r".

Hear it in a sentence

Je t'appelle ce soir.

I'll call you tonight.

Listen: Je t'appelle ce soir.

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"Je t'appelle ce soir" shows the elision of the object pronoun: "te" loses its vowel before "appelle", so the words fuse into /ʒə.ta.pɛl/. The conjugated "appelle" has the doubled "ll" and an audible open "eh", where the infinitive's vowel disappears — the same verb, two very different middles. French uses the present tense here for a future action, just as English can.

Where English speakers slip

Learners pronounce all three written syllables carefully, "a-puh-LAY", which is not wrong but sounds slow and bookish; native speakers say "a-PLAY". They also import the English "appeal" or "appellate", both of which stress the second syllable and use an "ee" vowel. And the reflexive form "s'appeler" is where the verb does most of its work — "je m'appelle" is "my name is", literally "I call myself".