Formal vs Informal French: Familier, Courant, Soutenu
Bouffer, manger and se restaurer all mean "to eat". They are all correct French. But say the wrong one in the wrong room and you sound either like a teenager at a job interview or like a nineteenth-century novel at a barbecue. French sorts its vocabulary into registers, and knowing which is which is one of the fastest ways to stop sounding like a textbook.
The three levels
- Familier — casual. Friends, family, texts, social media. Relaxed but not rude.
- Courant — neutral. The default: colleagues, shops, teachers, strangers. This is where you want to live.
- Soutenu — elevated. Literature, journalism, formal letters, speeches. Read it far more often than you speak it.
There is a fourth category, vulgaire, which is genuinely offensive. It is not the same as familier, and that confusion causes real accidents — plenty of learners avoid perfectly ordinary casual words because they were told "slang is rude".
The same meaning, three ways
| Familier | Courant | Soutenu | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| bouffer | manger | se restaurer | to eat |
| une bagnole | une voiture | un véhicule | a car |
| un flic | un policier | un agent de police | a police officer |
| des fringues | des vêtements | une tenue | clothes |
| un boulot | un travail | un emploi | a job |
| se casser | partir | s'en aller | to leave |
| un truc | une chose | un objet | a thing |
| marrant | drôle | amusant | funny |
Register is grammar, not just vocabulary
This is the part most courses skip. You can use entirely neutral words and still sound casual, because three grammatical habits carry register on their own.
1. Dropping the ne
In speech, French drops the first half of the negative constantly:
- Je ne sais pas. — courant / written
- Je sais pas. — familier, and what you will hear all day in Paris
Understanding this is essential for listening. Producing it is optional — but never drop the ne in writing.
2. How you form questions
- Tu viens ? — familier (intonation only)
- Est-ce que tu viens ? — courant
- Viens-tu ? — soutenu (inversion)
All three ask the same thing. Inversion in a casual conversation sounds stiff; intonation alone in a formal letter looks careless.
3. On instead of nous
On y va is what people say; Nous y allons is what people write. On takes a third-person singular verb even though it means "we" — a small point that unlocks a lot of natural-sounding French.
Why exams test this
From B1 upwards, the DELF and TCF marking grids reward adapting your language to the situation. It is a scored criterion, not a stylistic nicety. A candidate who writes a formal complaint letter containing c'est nul, or who greets a role-play shopkeeper with Salut, ça roule ?, loses marks that grammar cannot win back. If you are preparing for the oral, the DELF B2 oral tips and the TCF Canada expression orale scoring pages both come back to this.
What to actually do about it
- Learn new words in pairs. When you meet bouffer, file manger next to it with a mental label.
- Default to courant. Neutral French is never wrong. Casual and formal are what you add on top once you can read the room.
- Watch how characters switch. In any French series, the same person speaks differently to their boss and to their brother. That contrast is the lesson — try our shadowing practice with Dix pour cent, where register shifts constantly.
Practise this on your own
Reading about French registers is the easy half — you only own it once you've produced it yourself. On parisly.app you can work through this material at your own pace — reading, listening, writing and speaking practice with feedback, so the vocabulary in this lesson turns into French you can actually use.
Ready for the casual end of the scale? Try French slang for "awesome" and 5 casual French reactions. To have your register corrected in real time, book a lesson.