How to Pronounce 'Crêpe' in French [Effortless French Pronunciation]
In this episode, you'll learn how to pronounce the French word 'crêpe.' 🥞
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Transcript
Bonjour et bienvenue à tous! 😊
I'm your host, Mathilde, and you're listening to 'Effortless French Pronunciation'. This is a special pronunciation series from the French Made Easy podcast, specifically designed for French beginners wanting to perfect their pronunciation.
Hello everyone, bonjour tout le monde! Today, we're learning the pronunciation of the French word: ‘crêpe’. So in this episode, we’ll deconstruct together the pronunciation of the word crêpe, sound by sound, and then I’ll share with a few sentences so you can practice your pronunciation with me.
You probably all know what a crêpe is, but before we start, I just want to briefly talk about two types of crêpes: la crêpe sucrée and la galette, because there’s often some confusion here.
First, there’s the sweet crêpe, made with regular wheat flour. It looks like a lighter and thinner type of pancake. Now, in France, it’s never called a pancake, right?! While we do use the word "pancake" in French, it's not for crêpes. JThis type of crêpe is what we eat as a dessert or snack, often with Nutella, sugar, jam, or whatever you like on your sweet crêpes.
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Then, there’s the galette, also known as galette de sarrasin or galette Bretonne. This is the savoury crêpe made with buckwheat flour, not regular wheat flour. It's typically eaten for lunch or dinner, filled with things like cheese, ham, and eggs. There are so many different flavors possible.
Most commonly, when you say ‘crêpe’, it’s understood you're talking about a sweet crêpe, rather than a savoury one. If you mean a savory crêpe, you’re mostly going to say ‘galette’. It's not always the case for everyone in France; some people use them interchangeably and rely on context to differentiate the two types, or they specify by saying ‘crêpe sucrée’ or ‘crêpe salée.’ Personally, and again, this is just my way, it's not a hard rule, but for me, ‘crêpe’ is sweet, and ‘galette’ is savoury.
I’ll put a link to recipes to both of them in the transcript, so you can see the difference between the two.
Recette crêpe | Recette galette
Alright, now that we’ve got this out of the way, let's deconstruct the pronunciation of the word crêpe. I'll break it down for you.
HOW TO PRONOUNCE CRÊPE IN FRENCH 🥞
Crêpe: [krɛp]
‘c’: There are a few ways to pronounce the letter ‘c’ in French, but in the particular word, it’s pronounced [k]. Same as ‘koala.’
‘r’: Then we’ve got our infamous French R, [r]. Listen to episode number 21 for a full lesson on the French R.
Put together, so far we have [kr]
‘ê’: Now the ‘e’ with a circumflex accent is pronounced [ɛ] It’s not pronounced [ɛy]. I often hear, here in Australia, and love my Australian people btw, but I often hear ‘crêpe’ being pronounced ‘craype’ which you know is fine, it’s the way they pronounce it with the Australian accent I guess, but yes in the French version, the ‘ê’ is pronounced [ɛ] not pronounced [ɛy].
‘p’: then we have the ‘p’, nothing special here, pronounced basically the same way as in English.
‘e’: and super important, final ‘e’ is silent in that particular word. So you do not pronounce it.
So all together, we have: [krɛp].
And voilà! You've just pronounced the word ‘crêpe' the French way!
Oh and also, just one more thing, if you are talking about several ‘crêpes’, so in the plural form ‘des crêpes’, or ‘les crêpes’ you have also a silent ‘s’ at the end, if it’s in the plural. But you don’t pronounce it, it’s silent.
Now, let's practice with some sentences with our word 'crêpe' word:
Je voudrais une crêpe au Nutella, s'il vous plaît. (I would like a Nutella crêpe, please.) 🍫
Chaque dimanche, nous faisons des crêpes pour le goûter. (Every Sunday, we make crêpes for afternoon tea.) 🥞
Cette recette de crêpe est très simple à suivre. (This crêpe recipe is very easy to follow.) 👩🍳
Alright, so that’s it for this episode! Now you know how to pronounce ‘crêpe’!
Thank you for tuning into Effortless French Pronunciation, a series from the French Made Easy podcast. À bientôt, and remember, keep practicing!