Who decides what is correct in French?
Two to five thousand words have had two accepted spellings since 1990: so who really decides in French?
Between two and five thousand French words have two official spellings, both accepted since the spelling rectifications appeared in the Journal officiel on 6 December 1990. No institution can impose either one. Here is who decides what in France, Quebec and Canada, and what that changes for you.
Who has the power to say a form is correct?
Three institutions are cited as arbiters of French, and none has the same power. None can declare a sentence wrong with binding effect on the public: what settles a question is their agreement, or usage when there is none.
- The Académie française writes a dictionary and issues opinions, with no means of imposing them.
- The Office québécois de la langue française acts on a legal basis: the Charter of the French Language gives it Quebec's policy of linguistic officialisation (section 159) and the task of assisting administrations, businesses and individuals (section 162), according to its editorial policy.
- The Translation Bureau of Canada, by contrast, sells a service. Founded in 1934 and a special operating agency since 1995, it offers the federal administration translation and terminology that are, its mandate specifies, optional and billed at cost.
English has no academy at all, which is why this looks strange from the outside: there, the norm comes from commercial dictionaries and newspaper style guides, and "colour" and "color" are both correct depending on who you are writing for. French has institutions and still arrives at the same place, for different reasons.
What does the Académie française do, and not do?
It writes a dictionary, slowly. Its presentation of the editions states that the ninth contains more than 53,000 words, of which 21,000 are new compared with the eighth, which had 32,000. The two figures add up exactly.
The calendar says the rest: written from 1986 to November 2024, it took thirty-eight years, during which the language carried on without waiting. The tenth edition is under way, with first publications in June 2026.
What it does not do matters as much. It does not control textbooks, does not mark exam papers, has no regulatory power: its dictionary records a usage it judges established, with the lag its own dates make visible. A word that is missing is therefore not a wrong word, which is why noun gender is learned from usage and not from a decision.
Why do some words have two accepted spellings?
Because in 1990 France changed the spelling of thousands of words without abolishing the old one. Prepared by the Conseil supérieur de la langue française and presented by Maurice Druon on 19 June 1990, the rectifications appeared in the Journal officiel on 6 December 1990. The official text is blunt: "les formes actuellement en usage resteront évidemment admises", the forms currently in use will of course remain accepted. For teaching it provides instead for the rectified spellings becoming the rule, while those who have mastered the old one "pourront, naturellement, ne pas suivre cette nouvelle norme".
How many words? It depends which list you read. Druon announced "trois à quatre mille en vérité", out of the fifty thousand or so in everyday use. The FAQ of the Office québécois de la langue française widens the range: a little over two thousand words in the initial proposals, about two thousand eight hundred in its own list, about five thousand in the Grand vadémécum of 2009. The gap is not a disagreement: the rectifications are rules, not a closed list, and the more you apply them, the more words you find.
Rectified forms the Office gives as examples:
- "aout", the circumflex no longer being required on "i" and "u"
- "nénufar", which loses its "ph"
- "potpourri", "cogestion" and "hypertexte", written as single words
How does Quebec decide, and why differently?
Not with a dictionary, but with published criteria. Its editorial policy takes as reference the standard French used in Quebec, in a sociolinguistic approach. A usage must be contemporary, of a neutral or formal register rather than colloquial, popular or vulgar, and consistent with French word formation and syntax. That is exactly the information missing when you wonder whether a slang word can be used at work.
The Office keeps two banks: the Grand dictionnaire terminologique (1970s) for specialised fields, the Banque de dépannage linguistique (2002) for everyday language. A Quebec recommendation can therefore differ from usage in France without either being wrong, the mechanism set out in our comparison of Quebec French and French from France.
What these figures do not tell you
The Académie's 53,000 words are dictionary entries, not a measure of written French, and the two to five thousand rectified words are words on a list, not a measure of what people write. None says what share of French texts uses "aout" rather than "août": these institutions describe and recommend, none counts.
The range is itself a lesson: if you can quote two thousand or five thousand depending on the source, the object is not an inventory but a set of rules, and a single figure would be more wrong. The same caution applies elsewhere: the gaps between France, Quebec, Belgium and Switzerland are attested usages, not mistakes, as septante and nonante show.
So what should you do? For an exam, both spellings are accepted, but a single text must stay consistent. To write for Quebec, the Office's bank settles it; in France, the spelling taught is the rectified one and the old one remains accepted. A level test locates your starting point faster than a search for a rule.
That leaves the case no one will settle for you: when both forms are accepted, the choice rests on the person reading you, and neither a spellchecker nor a dictionary knows who that is. At Frenchee, teachers are qualified native speakers, classes are live, one to one or in small groups of three to five students, with no subscription: write the same sentence in both spellings in front of someone who reads French every day, and the answer stops being a matter of dictionaries.
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