French word of the week: son

Hello, French learners – welcome back to our word of the week blog. Today we are studying the word son.

Listen to the audio clip below to hear the pronunciation:

Son is both a possessive adjective and a masculine noun. We will see how the word appears and is used in different ways depending on its grammatical function. For further information, you can visit our Easy Learning French Grammar sections on adjectives and nouns.

Now, what exactly does son mean in English? It can be slightly confusing, as the translation is different in each grammatical sense. The one translation to avoid, which we sometimes call a ‘false friend’, is trying to translate this directly as the English word son. The French son has nothing to do with sons, daughters, or any type of family relationship.

Let’s start with examples of the possessive adjective, which you’ll see more often than the noun:

son his; her; their; one’s; its (3^rd person singular)

An important point to make here is that son has feminine and plural forms – sa and ses, respectively. Like all French adjectives, these must agree with the noun that comes after them. Neither their gender nor number depend on the subject of the sentence, as it would in English, which means son, sa and ses may all be translated either his, her, their, one’s, or its.

Elle va amener son frère a l’école. She’s going to bring her brother along to school.

C’est son livre. It’s his book.

Je ne suis pas d’accord avec son avis. I don’t agree with her point of view.

Kay vient chez nous avec son chaton. Kay is coming to our house with their kitten.

Son nouveau film est nul. His new film is rubbish.

à chacun son tour one at a time; everyone gets their turn

chacun son truc each to their own

Ma femme regarde le judo avec moi, même si ce n’est pas vraiment son truc. My wife watches the judo with me, even though it’s not really her thing.

Moving on to the noun, this translates to sound in English. You might see son, the singular form, as well as its plural form sons. Normally we just add -s at the end of a word to make a French singular noun into a plural.

Now on to our examples:

Vous pouvez baisser le son du piano ? On n’entend pas la guitare. Can you lower the sound of the piano? We can’t hear the guitar.

technicien du son sound technician

une bande-son a soundtrack (in a film)

au(x) son(s) de quelque chose to the sound(s) of something

Son chien restait dehors tout la nuit, donc nous nous sommes réveillés au son des aboiements. His dog stayed outside all night, so we woke up to the sound of barking.

Another week, another word under your belt! Come back next time to find out what our next French word of the week will be.

Written by Holly Tarbet, freelance copywriter and editor.

All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.