Why French Sound Inventories Differ — and How We Published a Bounded 35-Sound Learning Dataset

When a language-learning product says it teaches “the sounds of French,” one deceptively simple question appears immediately: how many sounds are there? There is no useful answer without first defining the job the inventory is meant to do. A phonological analysis, a pronunciation dictionary, a speech-recognition system, and a beginner curriculum can all model French sound structure differently without one of them necessarily being careless. They have different users, evidence, and failure costs. Our team encountered this while turning Parle's internal pronunciation inventory into a public CSV. We needed a list that could connect IPA symbols to French spelling patterns, example words, and short mouth cues for English-speaking beginners. We also needed to avoid presenting one product's learning model as the only correct account of French phonology. The result is a bounded dataset of 35 practical sound entries. This article explains the design decisions, the schema, and the limits we published with it. A teaching inventory is a model, not a census The International Phonetic Alphabet gives us a shared notation for describing speech sounds. It does not require every analyst or teacher to draw identical category boundaries for every language variety. The official IPA chart is a notation system; selecting a French inventory still requires linguistic and pedagogical decisions. Counts can change when an inventory treats any of the following differently: a contrast that is maintained by some speakers but merged by others; a marginal or loan sound that appears mainly in borrowed words; schwa, whose realization and deletion depend heavily on context and variety; a historical contrast that remains visible in spelling but not in every speaker's production; a phonetic realization versus a contrastive phoneme; a glide represented separately from its related vowel. For a curriculum, the important question is not “What number wins?” It is “What distinctions and cues help this audienc