What Are the Names for Close Family Members in French?

In this lesson, we learn ten words for close family members in French.

Watch the video as many times as you need, until you feel you can give the French translations as the video plays!

Now we can see what we’ve learned. Look at the English and see if you can provide the French for these words:

Part 1:

a child	Show un enfant
brother	Show le frère
daughter	Show la fille
father	Show le père
family	Show la famille

Part 2:

husband	Show le mari
mother	Show la mère
sister	Show la sœur
son	Show le fils
wife	Show la femme

Notes on Usage

Familiar Terms

You might also hear maman (‘mummy’) and papa (‘daddy’) within families.

Why Does This List Have the Words le, la and un?

You’ll see that each word given in this list has the words un, le or la preceding them.

Le and la are the French words for ‘the,’ so le père in this list and la mère actually mean ‘the father’ and ‘the mother.’

This is because French words reflect gender, with père being masculine and mère, of course, being feminine. The words in this list are all nouns, because they name objects, in this case people.

However, all words in French, even if they do not represent people have a grammatical gender. So, for example ‘coat’ is le manteau, (masculine) while a ‘jacket’ is la veste (feminine).

Therefore, it makes sense to learn the gender of the noun at the same time as learning the word itself, which is why we have them in all our word lists.

While this works for many nouns, some nouns begin with a vowel and in these cases the word for ‘the’ is merged into the word as follows:

le enfant > l’enfant

So now we don’t know whether it is a masculine or feminine word, so we use un instead to show that it is masculine. Un enfant means ‘a child,’ and the un shows it’s masculine. ‘A vest’ on the other hand would be une veste, as un becomes une for feminine words.

What Are Families Like in France?

On average, a Frenchwoman has almost two children, which gives France one of the highest birth rates in Europe. However, families with three or more children have been on the decline since the 1990s, while families with only one child are on the rise.

The number of single parent families has been on the rise in France and, today, almost one in four families are single parent families.

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