Family members in French: mère to belle-sœur

The family members in French are la mère (mother), le père (father), le frère (brother), la sœur (sister), le fils (son), la fille (daughter), la grand-mère (grandmother), le grand-père (grandfather), l’oncle (uncle), la tante (aunt) and le cousin or la cousine (cousin). The family is la famille, and "mom" in French is maman, "dad" papa. Three things catch learners out: fils is said "feess", with the s and without the l; beau-père is both a father-in-law and a stepfather; and ma becomes mon before a vowel, so "my friend", for a woman, is mon amie. The French family vocabulary is below with how to say each word, then the rules, then which family words French films say most.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 9 min read

Family members in French

The last column is how often each word is said in French film and television subtitles; more on that below. The ll of fille is a y sound, as in "yes", and the -an, -en and -on of maman, enfants, grand and oncle are nasal vowels, said through the nose with no n after them. The s of les is silent before a consonant and heard as z before a vowel: les parents but les‿enfants.

Fils, fille, femme and parents: four words that mean two things

• Fils, "son", is spelled the same in the singular and the plural, and it is also the plural of fil, a thread or a wire. The two are said differently: the son is "feess", the threads "feel". It is one of the few French words with two pronunciations for one spelling.
• Fille is "daughter" and also "girl": ma fille is my daughter, une petite fille is a little girl. With a hyphen, une petite-fille is a granddaughter.
• Femme is "woman" and also "wife": sa femme is his wife. The more formal words are l’épouse, "wife", and l’époux, "husband", and the subtitles say the everyday mari more than ten times as often as époux.
• Parents is "parents", the father and the mother, and also "relatives" in general: un parent proche is a close relative, not one of your parents.

Larousse gives père, mère, frère and sœur a religious sense as well: père is the title of a priest, mère the superior of a convent, and frère and sœur are what monks and nuns are called.

Maman and papa, mamie and tonton

Larousse defines maman as the word a child calls its mother, and papa as "father" in the setting of childhood; mère and père are the neutral words. On screen, though, maman and papa are anything but rare, as the counts below show.

The other relatives have familiar forms too, and Larousse labels each one:

Mamie is said more than five times as often as mémé in the subtitles, and papy and papi together more than four times as often as pépé. Mémé and pépé also mean an old woman and an old man in general. Oncle is said more than ten times as often as tonton, and fiston, the affectionate word for a son, is said more often than neveu. Tata is not counted: Larousse’s entry for tata is a different word, a wave of the hand in New Caledonia, and a count cannot tell the two apart.

Beau-père and belle-mère: one word, two relatives

French builds its in-laws and its step-relatives with beau- and belle-, and it uses the same word for both.

Larousse defines beau-père first as the father of your spouse and second as the spouse of one of your parents, for the children of an earlier marriage or union: the father-in-law and the stepfather are the same word. Belle-mère works the same way. So mon beau-père on its own can be either, and French settles it by context, or by saying it in full: le père de ma femme, "my wife’s father", or le mari de ma mère, "my mother’s husband".

The children work the same way, with one way out. Beau-fils is a stepson and also a son-in-law, but the son-in-law has a word of his own, le gendre, and the subtitles say it about twice as often as beau-fils in both its senses together. Belle-fille is a stepdaughter and also a daughter-in-law; the daughter-in-law once had la bru, which Larousse now marks as dated, and the subtitles hardly say it.

French did have separate words for a stepfather and a stepmother, parâtre and marâtre. Larousse still lists both, but each has a second sense, a bad father and an unnatural, bad mother, and it notes that marâtre is used in particular in children’s tales. Neither is a neutral word.

Demi-frère and demi-sœur are half-brother and half-sister, a brother or a sister by one parent only.

Plurals with a hyphen

In a compound family word, the adjective takes the plural and the noun takes the plural, but beau, belle and petit agree while demi never changes:

• beau-père, beaux-pères; belle-mère, belles-mères; belle-sœur, belles-sœurs
• grand-père, grands-pères; petit-fils, petits-fils; petite-fille, petites-filles
• demi-frère, demi-frères
• les grands-parents, the grandparents, and les petits-enfants, the grandchildren

Grand-mère is the odd one. Larousse gives two plurals, grands-mères and grand-mères; Wiktionnaire traces the second to a time when grand had one form for both genders. Both turn up in the subtitles, grands-mères a little more often: 0.5 times per million words against 0.4. Grands-parents has only the one spelling in Larousse, and the subtitles write it that way about nine times in ten.

Mon, ma, mes, and mon amie

"My" agrees with the relative, not with you: mon père, ma mère, mes parents. "Your" is ton, ta, tes, and "his" or "her" is son, sa, ses; French does not say whose it is, so sa mère is his mother or her mother.

Before a feminine word that starts with a vowel or a silent h, ma, ta and sa become mon, ton and son: mon amie, "my friend" (a woman), mon épouse, "my wife". The n is then said, joined to the next word, so mon‿oncle sounds like "mon-noncle" and mon‿amie like "mon-namie". This is liaison. The articles le and la do the opposite and lose their vowel: l’oncle, l’épouse, l’enfant. That is elision, and it is why the table gives l’oncle without saying whether it is le or la: it is le.

Which family words do French films say most?

We counted each family word in French film and television subtitles.

Père is first, at 809.1 times per million words, ahead of mère at 637.7, and both are said more than papa and maman, which are almost level. Femme and fille sit high in the list because they also mean "woman" and "girl", and a count cannot tell the senses apart; fils is a ceiling for the same reason, since it is also the plural of fil. Most rows count the singular only; cousin, neveu and nièce add their plurals. Père, femme, mère and fille are all among the 200 most frequent entries in the whole subtitle list.

Sœur is counted in two spellings, and the subtitles split almost exactly in half between sœur with the joined œ and soeur typed with two letters. The in-laws are all near the bottom, beau-père just ahead of belle-mère. A hyphenated word is counted as it is written; a subtitle that drops the hyphen splits grand-mère into grand and mère and is lost to its row.

Learn them in a sentence

• J’ai un frère et deux sœurs. — I have one brother and two sisters.
• Ma mère s’appelle Claire. — My mother is called Claire.
• Quel âge a ton père ? — How old is your father?
• Mes grands-parents habitent à Lyon. — My grandparents live in Lyon.
• Tu as des enfants ? — Do you have children?
• C’est mon amie Julie. — This is my friend Julie.

The family words are taught early in the free French course, Verbavia (our own course), with a recording of each. The 100 words French films say most are in the most common French words, and other everyday sets are colours in French and numbers 1 to 100 in French.

Sources

• Larousse, Dictionnaire de français: beau-père, belle-mère, belle-fille, beau-fils, belle-sœur, gendre and bru (the in-laws and step-relatives, and bru as dated); marâtre and parâtre; grand-mère (both plurals), grand-père, grands-parents, petit-fils and demi-frère (plurals); père, mère, frère and sœur (religious senses); fils, fil, fille, femme, mari, époux, épouse and parent; maman, papa, mamie, mémé, papy, pépé, tonton, tatie, frangin and fiston (the register labels).
• Wiktionnaire: fils, for the two pronunciations, /fis/ for the son and /fil/ for the threads, after the Trésor de la langue française; grand-mère, for why grand once had one form for both genders.
• Wikipedia: French articles and determiners (mon, ton and son before a feminine word starting with a vowel), Liaison (French)) and Elision (French)).
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords lists, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_thousand.py and printed from its output rather than typed.