Qui, que, dont, où: how to choose the right French relative pronoun
Qui, que, dont, où: function decides. And "dont" picks up a noun in writing, a verb in speech.
The choice rests on the function of the group being replaced, and "dont" is the tricky one. In a written corpus, 77 % of 384 "dont" relatives stand for a complement of a noun; in a spoken corpus, 63 % of 107 stand for a complement of a verb, according to a 2016 study.
What does a French relative pronoun do, and how many are there?
A relative pronoun attaches a clause to a noun already given, the antecedent, and takes inside that clause the place of the group you do not repeat: "Je cherche le livre. Je t'ai parlé de ce livre." becomes "Je cherche le livre dont je t'ai parlé."
The list is closed. The CCDMD sheet on the relative clause lists "qui", "que", "quoi", "dont", "où" and "lequel" with its contracted forms. Each one stands for a function, not for a meaning:
- "qui", a subject: "l'acteur qui joue le rôle";
- "que", a direct object or a predicate: "les films que tu as préférés";
- "dont", a group starting with "de": "l'acteur dont j'envie le talent";
- "où", a group of place or time: "le cinéma où nous sommes allés";
- "à quoi", "sur quoi", a group with another preposition: "c'est ce à quoi j'aspire".
English picks its relative pronoun on what you point at, a person or a thing, and it lets you drop the pronoun altogether and leave the preposition at the end: "the book I told you about". French allows neither. The pronoun is never omitted, the preposition never stays behind, and the choice is made on function, exactly as with the pronouns "y" and "en".
How do you choose between "qui" and "que" without guessing?
One test is enough, and it looks at the verb of the relative clause. No subject, "qui". A subject but no direct object, "que".
"La femme qui parle": "parle" has no subject. "La femme que j'écoute": "écoute" already has "je" as its subject and is missing an object. The same test works for "ce qui m'intéresse" against "ce que je préfère".
The trap is elsewhere. Because English chooses between "who" and "which", many learners expect French to care whether the antecedent is human. It does not: "la femme qui parle" and "le train qui part", "la femme que j'écoute" and "le train que j'attends". That confusion sits in our list of the most common French grammar mistakes.
Why does "dont" behave differently in writing and in speech?
Because the sentences are not the same. Anne Abeillé, Barbara Hemforth and Elodie Winckel counted "dont" relatives in two corpora and published the results at the Congrès mondial de linguistique française in 2016: the French Treebank, about 800 000 words of Le Monde articles from 1989 to 1995, and CFPP2000, 29 long interviews recorded in Paris.
In writing, out of 384 relatives, 295 "dont" stand for a complement of a noun (77 %) and 73 for a complement of a verb (19 %). In speech, out of 107 relatives, the ratio flips: 67 complement of a verb (63 %), 30 complement of a noun (28 %).
In other words, the "dont" of the press is the one in "un ouvrage dont la qualité est remarquable", and the one of conversation is the one in "l'auteure dont je t'ai parlé". In the spoken corpus a single verb carries most of it: "parler" in 47 of the 67 cases.
The practical consequence is simple. To read a newspaper, learn "dont" followed by a noun. To speak, learn the verbs built with "de": parler de, se souvenir de, avoir besoin de, être fier de. And do not count on "de qui" as a way out: in a literary corpus of 222 texts and 13.2 million words, the same authors find more than 13 000 "dont" relatives against 319 with "de qui", in the Journal of French Language Studies in 2020.
Which mistakes with "dont" come up most often?
The Office québécois de la langue française puts it plainly in its sheet on "dont", updated in 2015: it is "sans doute le pronom relatif dont l'emploi est le plus délicat", probably the hardest relative pronoun to use. The mistakes it lists come from one mechanism, since "dont" already contains "de":
- no possessive after it: "un ouvrage dont la qualité est remarquable", not "dont sa qualité";
- no "de" before the antecedent: either "c'est cette voiture dont j'ai envie" or "c'est de cette voiture que j'ai envie", not both;
- no "en" inside the clause: "cet ordinateur dont il est très satisfait", not "dont il en est très satisfait".
The opposite error is more common among learners: using "que" where "de" is required. You write "les documents dont nous avons besoin" and not "que nous avons besoin", "la façon dont la situation a été décrite" and not "la façon que", "ce dont il s'agit" and not "ce qu'il s'agit".
Finally, "dont" has a limit: when the "de" is locked inside another prepositional group, it no longer works. The sheet writes "l'entreprise sur le site de laquelle figure cette promotion" and rejects "l'entreprise dont cette promotion figure sur le site". You then need "de laquelle" or "duquel", much as you need the right preposition before a place name.
What these numbers do not tell you
The 384 and the 107 are occurrences of "dont", not speakers, and they do not measure how often French uses relative clauses. They say how "dont" divides up when it shows up.
The two corpora differ by more than the medium: the authors note that their topics are not the same, one being press from the 1990s, the other Paris interviews. The gap between 77 % and 63 % therefore mixes writing, period and subject matter.
The spoken sample is small: of 134 "dont" found in Paris, the authors set aside 27 without saying which, and they say so in a footnote. That is why we quote counts rather than every proportion: the article prints "plus de 71 %" for "parler" where 47 out of 67 gives 70, and one of its breakdowns does not add up to its own total. The counts hold, the fine detail less well.
What remains is a decision rule that needs no figures. First, find the group missing from the relative clause. Then ask whether the word governing it calls for "de": if it does, it is "dont". Finally, read it back: if "de", "son" or "en" turns up again, remove it.
A grammar sheet can be read alone, and our level test will tell you where you stand. But knowing which of the two kinds of "dont" belongs in the sentence you are about to say gets decided in front of someone who hears you say it. At Frenchee, classes are live with qualified native teachers, one to one or in a small group of three to five students, with no subscription: enough to put your relative clauses in a real situation rather than on a worksheet, as with the gender of nouns.
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