French · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "grand" in French?

Q: How do you pronounce grand in French?

grand is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ɡʁɑ̃/. It means “big / tall.” grahn through the nose — a throat "r" right after the "g", and both the "n" and the "d" silent.

grahn through the nose — a throat "r" right after the "g", and both the "n" and the "d" silent.

grand /ɡʁɑ̃/

One nasal syllable that ends in open air. The word takes the phrase's beat when it follows a noun, but as one of the short adjectives that precede their noun it is often a light lead-in: un grand JARDIN.

Listen: grand

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Sound it out

gr A hard "g" straight into the uvular "r". Both sounds are made at the back of the mouth, so this cluster is more comfortable than it looks — the tongue tip never moves.

an The nasal vowel /ɑ̃/. Open mouth, air out through the nose, tongue lying flat and still.

d Silent in the masculine. It surfaces in liaison as a "t" sound — "un grand homme" is /ɡʁɑ̃.t‿ɔm/ — and it becomes fully audible in the feminine "grande".

Hear it in a sentence

Mon appartement n'est pas grand.

My apartment isn't big.

Listen: Mon appartement n'est pas grand.

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"Mon appartement n'est pas grand" puts the adjective at the end, so the nasal vowel gets its full length. The negation elides — "ne" becomes "n'" before "est" — and "mon appartement" carries an obligatory liaison, /mɔ̃.n‿a.paʁ.tə.mɑ̃/, so the nasal of "mon" produces a real "n" that links into the noun. The sentence has three nasal vowels in total.

Where English speakers slip

The English word "grand" is spelled identically and gets substituted wholesale, complete with a real "n", a released "d", and an American "r". French has none of those: the "r" is a throat rasp, the vowel is nasal with the tongue never touching, and the "d" is silent. The exception is liaison, where that "d" comes back as a "t" — an oddity worth remembering for "grand homme" and "grand ami".