Common French mistakes for Arabic speakers: where they come from

Morocco and Algeria are the two largest countries of origin for international students in France, with 35 700 and 27 700 enrolled in 2024-2025 according to the French higher education ministry. Yet the difficulties specific to Arabic speakers are rarely explained on their own terms: five French consonants are missing from Arabic, and that is the easy part.

Why do the same mistakes come back with almost every Arabic speaker?

Because a learner's mistake is almost never random. It is usually the trace of a habit from the first language applied to the new one, what linguists call interference. When your language does not separate two sounds, your ear does not separate them either, and your mouth produces the one it knows.

Two contrastive studies document this for Arabic and French. A study in the journal Norsud (University of Misurata), by Abdelwahab Elsaadani in December 2016, lists the French sounds absent from standard Arabic and the substitutions they trigger. An analysis of Libyan students' errors by Shaima Nouri Algubbi, in the same journal in June 2020, does the same work on the grammar side.

Which French sounds do not exist in Arabic?

According to the 2016 study, five French consonants are absent from standard Arabic: "[g], [ɲ], [R] grasseyé, [p] et [v]". The last two, the author writes, cause difficulty for almost the majority of the Arabic speakers observed.

The substitutions are regular:

• /p/ becomes /b/, so "pierre" (stone) merges with "bière" (beer)
• /v/ becomes /f/, so "télévision" comes out as "téléfision"

Useful practice does not repeat a sound in isolation. It works on pairs of words that differ by that sound alone: "pain" and "bain", "poisson" and "boisson", "vous" and "fou", "vais" and "fait".

One honest note: if your everyday Arabic is a Maghrebi or Levantine dialect, you already produce /p/ and /v/ in words borrowed from French or Italian, which standard Arabic does not have. Our article on pronunciation sets out the drill.

Why are the vowels harder than the consonants?

Because French has far more of them than Arabic, and because a missing consonant is audible while an approximate vowel goes unnoticed for years.

The 2016 study notes that French [u] is pronounced as [i] and that nasal vowels are denasalised, replaced by "voyelle orale suivie d'une consonne nasale", an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant. An acoustic study of French vowels produced by Jordanian learners, held in the University of Mutah archive, reaches the same point from another direction: /ø/ and /œ/ do not exist in Arabic, /u/ is distorted, learners have a single sound where French has two for /e/ and /ɛ/ and for /o/ and /ɔ/, and the nasals /ɑ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ are confused.

The order to work in: "tu" against "tout", then "deux" against "dos", then "vin", "vent", "vont", three nasal vowels Arabic does not have.

One warning: neither study gives a percentage. They describe observed substitutions, not how often they occur, so if a figure circulates on this subject, ask for its source. For the ear, training on fast spoken French does the rest.

Which grammar mistakes come straight from Arabic?

The 2020 analysis, based on Libyan students' written work, finds six families of errors: choice of definite article, subject-verb agreement, relative pronouns, confusion of masculine and feminine in nouns and adjectives, wrong choice of preposition, and missing noun-adjective agreement. Two examples quoted in the study say it all: "Le somme" for "la somme", and "Le chômage que existe" for "le chômage qui existe".

Each has a clear cause on the Arabic side:

• Arabic marks definiteness with a prefix and has no indefinite article, hence "j'ai acheté livre" and articles picked at random
• Arabic does have two genders, but they do not line up with the French ones, and false confidence costs more than plain ignorance
• Arabic does not mark subject and object by word order, hence the confusion between "qui" and "que"

The quietest trap is the article. The Language Portal of Canada notes, on its page on omitting un and une, that the article may be left out before a predicate noun to express a general idea, and gives "L'industrie est source d'emplois" alongside "L'industrie est une source d'emplois". In other words, the Arabic habit of dropping the article is right now and then, and that is what makes it hard to correct. Our pages on common grammar mistakes and on noun gender cover both points.

What does Arabic give you in advance, and what do these lists leave out?

An error list is an inventory of what goes wrong, so it misses what your language hands you. You already know that a noun carries a gender, that an adjective usually follows it, as in French most of the time, and that a verb changes shape with the person. And part of the French lexicon comes from Arabic.

The comparison is instructive for English speakers too. English gives you /p/ and /v/ for free, which removes both consonants above at once. But it has no front rounded vowels and no nasal vowels, so the whole vowel section applies to you unchanged, and it has no grammatical gender, so you start the gender problem further back than an Arabic speaker does.

Two limits before taking these studies as a full portrait. They cover Libyan and Jordanian students and describe standard Arabic, so a Moroccan or Tunisian speaker does not start from the same place. And they put errors of very unequal cost on the same level: a /v/ close to /f/ almost never blocks understanding, while a wrong gender drags a chain of agreements with it. Start with what bothers your listener, not with what reveals your accent.

At Frenchee, live classes are taught by qualified native teachers, one to one or in small groups of three to five, with no subscription: that is the setting in which these sound pairs can be taken one at a time, starting from your own first language rather than a generic syllabus. Our level test places your starting point in a few minutes.

Sources

• Abdelwahab Elsaadani, "Analyse des interférences phonologiques entre l'arabe et le français", Norsud no. 8, December 2016
• Shaima Nouri Algubbi, "Analyse des erreurs d'interférences morphologiques des étudiants libyens", Norsud no. 15, 2020
• French Ministry of Higher Education, Note Flash du SIES no. 22, September 2025
• Language Portal of Canada, "être un/une suivi d'un nom"