Site downtime tomorrow morning

Due to planned network maintenance, there are likely to be some brief interruptions to the French Linguistics site tomorrow morning. Interruptions will occur between 2am and 5am GMT -5, or between around 7am and 10am for users in the UK.

If before the interruptions, you have already loaded up one of the pages with interactive games or grammar exercises, these will generally continue to work provided that you don't close the page.

Apologies for any invoncenienve-- the maintenance is being carried out to the Internet infrastructure and is beyond this site's control!

Biographies added to French MP3 section

The French MP3 page, which lists a few recommended albums by French-speaking artists available in MP3 format, will be augmented over the coming months with biographies of various artists. Biographies have currently been added for the following artists:

• Bénabar, the name a verlanisation of Barnabé, who combines styles of artists such as Georges Brassens with witty lyrics to reflect our modern times;
• Jean-Jacques Goldman, one of France's most versatile and successful artists, from traditional rock to the more varied repertoire of Chansons pour les pieds;
• Céline Dion, and her transition from 80s cheese to some of France's best-selling music of all time;
• Christophe Maé, who made fame more recently, along with NRJ Music Award winner Grégory Lemarchal, whose career was sadly cut short by cystic fibrosis last year.

Text accentuation tool

Users of the French Linguistics site may be interested in a text accentuation tool published on our sister Español-Inglés site. The tool, which you can also add to your own web page, blog or social networking profile, allows you to add accents to a short piece of text with simple sequences (e.g. "e/" for an e acute) that can easily be typed from any keyboard. Thus, the tool is useful in cases where your keyboard or configuration does not normally support accented characters easily.

For alternative methods, see the French Linguistics guide on how to type accents.