Le, la, un, des: which determiner goes before a French noun?
Le, la, un, des, du: determiners are 15% of French words. Which one to use, and when to switch to "de".
In French, a common noun almost never stands alone: a small word comes first, le, la, un, des or du. In two annotated corpora, determiners account for 15% of all words, 61,098 out of 400,385 in one and 85,494 out of 573,370 in the other. Here is how to pick the right one.
Why does a French noun almost never stand alone?
The CCDMD puts it in one sentence: "Le déterminant est un mot généralement obligatoire devant le nom commun", a determiner is generally compulsory before a common noun. Its example settles it: "Les élèves étudient", and not "Élèves étudient". Where many languages leave the noun bare, French opens a slot in front of it and expects it filled.
That slot keeps coming back. For the French-GSD corpus, Universal Dependencies reports "61098 DET tokens (15%)" out of 400,385 syntactic words, roughly one word in seven. The French-FTB corpus, built on articles from Le Monde, has 85,494 out of 573,370: 15% as well.
English has the same slot, with "the" and "a", so the idea is not the problem. The trap is where English puts nothing: plurals and mass nouns go bare, "I drink coffee", "books are expensive", while French writes "je bois du café" and "les livres sont chers". Every empty slot in your English sentence is a choice to make in French.
How many determiners does French have?
The list is short and closed. The CCDMD splits it into two families, the identifying ones:
- definite: le, la, l', les;
- demonstrative: ce, cet, cette, ces;
- possessive: mon, ma, mes, ton, son, notre, votre, leurs;
- interrogative and exclamative: quel, quelle, quels, quelles.
And the quantifying ones:
- indefinite: un, une, des;
- partitive: du, de la, de l';
- quantity words: aucun, plusieurs, quelques, chaque, beaucoup de.
A few dozen words cover it: for French-GSD the project lists only "19 DET lemmas" and "63 DET types" for 61,098 occurrences. The most frequent forms are "le" 13,756 times, "la" 9,676, "les" 8,730, "l'" 6,339, then "un" 3,929, "une" 3,373 and "des" 1,700. The four definite forms alone add up to 38,501 occurrences, 63% of the total, a sum we did ourselves.
Edouard Ngamountsika, at the Congrès mondial de linguistique française 2010, counted 4,960 determiners in 56,668 words of spoken French recorded in Brazzaville in 2003 and 2004: 2,808 definite, 781 indefinite, 534 demonstrative, 463 possessive, 249 quantity words and 125 partitive. The six lines do add up to 4,960, which we checked. From written press French to the spoken French of Brazzaville, the order holds: definite first by a wide margin, indefinite far behind, partitive last.
"Le livre" or "un livre": how do you choose?
For the Office québécois de la langue française, the definite determiner introduces "un nom désignant une réalité précise, qui est connu dans le contexte de l'énonciation", something specific and already known in context. What matters is the second half: known to the person you are talking to. "Ferme la porte" assumes a door she can identify, "il y a une porte au fond" assumes none.
Two mechanical rules come on top, both automatic. Elision: "le" and "la" become "l'" before a vowel. Contraction: "à le" gives "au", "à les" gives "aux", "de le" gives "du", "de les" gives "des". That contraction is why "du" and "des" turn up in two very different jobs, and it explains much of the hesitation.
Gender drives the form, so you need to know whether a noun is masculine or feminine before choosing between "le" and "la"; and when starting from scratch, learning each noun with its determiner costs less than learning it bare.
When do you need "du", "de la", "des", and when just "de"?
The same office defines the partitive as the determiner before "un nom désignant une réalité qui n'est pas dénombrable", something not countable, and gives its shape: "la préposition de suivi d'un déterminant défini", "de" plus a definite determiner. Its examples: "boire du lait, chercher de l'or, manger des pâtes".
Three moves are then enough.
- After a negation the partitive shrinks to "de". The entry prints it: "Dans une phrase négative, le déterminant partitif est de : je n'ai plus de temps." So "je bois du café", but "je ne bois pas de café".
- After a quantity word, same reduction: "beaucoup de vin", "peu de neige", "assez de temps".
- Before an adjective placed in front of the noun, "des" becomes "de", the CCDMD notes: "de beaux vestons", "d'affreuses robes".
Then the meaning trap, the one that lasts longest. "J'aime le café" is about coffee in general, "je bois du café" about an unspecified amount, "je bois un café" about one cup. All three are correct and none means the same thing. And the pronoun "en" stands in for that partitive group, "du café ? j'en bois", which is what "y" and "en" are for.
What these figures do not tell you
These are occurrences, not speakers: the 61,098 determiners in French-GSD say how often a determiner shows up, not how many French speakers use one.
The annotation does not separate the partitive: "des" sits under the lemma "un" and the lemma "du" has only 101 occurrences tagged as a determiner. Those pages measure determiners, not partitives, and our only partitive count is the Brazzaville one, 125 out of 4,960.
They have their wobbles too, and we are publishing them: the 15% is computed on the 400,385 syntactic words rather than the 389,363 tokens, where it would be closer to 16%, and the page announces three version numbers, 2, 2.7 and 2.18.
The Brazzaville study needs the same sorting: its percentages are truncated, add up to 99.98, and its text prints 2.56% for the partitive where its table gives 2.52%. So we quote the raw counts, which do add up. The author limits his own scope, one city and a student population: "Il faudrait plusieurs études", several studies would be needed. And two corpora are written and from France, the third spoken and Congolese: the hierarchy carries over, not the exact shares.
The decision rule comes down to three questions. Is the noun countable? If it is, does the person you are speaking to already know which one you mean? And if a negation or a quantity word comes in front, replace "du", "de la" and "des" with "de".
The list of determiners can be read in a page, and our level test will tell you where you stand. But choosing between "j'aime le café" and "je bois du café" is decided inside the sentence you are about to say, in front of someone who hears you say it. At Frenchee, classes are live with qualified native teachers, one to one or in a group of three to five, with no subscription.
