French Punctuation: The Space Before ?! and Other Surprises

You can conjugate the subjunctive and still look like a foreigner in writing — because French punctuation plays by its own rules. Spaces appear before question marks, quotes grow wings, and decimal points become commas. Five surprises, five fixes.

1. The space before “double” punctuation

Any mark made of two parts — ? ! : ; — takes a space BEFORE it in French: « Vraiment ? », « Attention ! », « Voici la règle : ». (Typographically a thin non-breaking space, but a normal one passes.) Single marks — . , — hug the word like in English.

2. Guillemets, not quotation marks

French quotes are « angled » with spaces inside: « Bonjour », dit-elle. Nested speech in novels often drops to a dash dialogue style — one dash per speaker, no closing quotes for pages. Reading French fiction, the dashes ARE the quotation marks.

3. Numbers: the great comma swap

Decimals use a comma: 3,5 (trois virgule cinq). Thousands use a space: 1 000 000. So 1,500 in French is one-and-a-half, not fifteen hundred — a genuinely expensive misunderstanding, unpacked in numbers 100–1000.

4. Capital letters are shy

• Days & months: lowercase — lundi, janvier (see dates)
• Languages: lowercase — je parle français
• Nationalities: noun capital, adjective lowercase — un Français, un livre français
• je: never capitalised mid-sentence (English’s ego-capital I is a curiosity to the French)

5. Accents on capitals

Officially yes: À bientôt, États-Unis. French keyboards make it awkward, so natives often skip them — but l’Académie wants them, and « SALE » vs « SALÉ » (dirty vs salted) shows why. Accent basics in the accent marks lesson.

FAQ

Do I have to type the space before « ? » in texts?

Casual texting forgives everything. But in emails, essays and anything printed, the space is standard French typography — its absence reads as foreign.

How do I type « and » on my keyboard?

Windows: Alt+0171 / Alt+0187. Mac: Option+7 / Shift+Option+7. Phones: long-press the straight quote. Or write straight quotes and let editors survive.

Why does French write M. for Monsieur but Mme without a dot?

The rule: abbreviation keeps its dot only if the last letter is cut. M(onsieur) → M. but M(adam)e keeps its final e → Mme. Elegant, once you see it.

The full ruleset — dashes, ellipses, spacing — lives on the French punctuation chart.

Quick practice