Septante, nonante, huitante: reading numbers for a Belgian or Swiss audience

Written French is the same from Brussels to Geneva by way of Paris, give or take a handful of words. Spoken French is not. And the place where the gap is heard most clearly is not the accent, it is the number. A Belgian newsroom, a French-speaking Swiss authority, an association writing to members in both countries: they all write "70% turnout" or "90 euros", and they all expect the ear to hear what their audience says every day. That is exactly where a voice tuned for France falls short.

What a France-tuned voice does

A synthetic voice does not read digits, it reads numbers: it turns "70" into words before pronouncing them, and it does so according to the variety of French it was trained on. A France voice reads "70" as "soixante-dix", "92" as "quatre-vingt-douze", "80" as "quatre-vingts". That is right for a Parisian listener, and it is precisely what a listener in Liège or Lausanne never hears in daily life.

This is not a pronunciation fault in the sense of a mangled word: "quatre-vingt-douze" is perfectly articulated. It is a variety fault. The voice correctly says the number of a different country from your reader's. And because the rest of the article is in a neutral French that suits everyone, the contrast is all the sharper when the first number lands.

The table of forms

Here is what actually changes, for the tens concerned. It is a fact of language, verifiable, independent of any tool:

| Number | France | Belgium | French-speaking Switzerland |
|---|---|---|---|
| 70 | soixante-dix | septante | septante |
| 71 | soixante et onze | septante et un | septante et un |
| 80 | quatre-vingts | quatre-vingts | huitante (Vaud, Valais, Fribourg) or quatre-vingts (Geneva, Neuchâtel) |
| 90 | quatre-vingt-dix | nonante | nonante |
| 98 | quatre-vingt-dix-huit | nonante-huit | nonante-huit |

Two things to keep. First, Belgium and Switzerland agree on "septante" and "nonante" but part ways on 80: Belgium says "quatre-vingts" like France, while part of French-speaking Switzerland says "huitante". Second, "huitante" is not universal in Switzerland: Geneva and Neuchâtel say "quatre-vingts". A tool claiming to "speak Swiss" would therefore have to choose between two Switzerlands first. That is one more reason not to promise what you cannot keep, a choice we explain in what a single tool can and cannot adjust across the variants of French.

The one lever you actually control: the text

Here is the useful point, and it is simple. A voice reads the word "septante" exactly as written: it is an ordinary French word, not an exception to be corrected. What it interprets in its own way is the digit "70", which it turns into words according to its variety. So the lever you hold from end to end is the written form.

For a Belgian or Swiss audience, three habits settle almost every case. Spell out, in the local form, the numbers that carry a sentence's meaning ("a rise of septante euros") rather than leaving the digit to the voice's interpretation. Keep digits for tables, long amounts and data where nobody reads "soixante-dix" as a regional marker. And proof the audio on the passages that matter, because a number said wrong is invisible on the page: it is the same discipline as for reading numbers aloud in French in general, where every written form has an expected reading and a wrong one.

This advice has an honest limit: it holds for numbers that mean something in the sentence, not for a two-hundred-line listing. In a figures table, spelling out every number is unreadable to the eye, and audio of a table is a thankless exercise in any case, which we cover separately.

What we do not do

We do not offer a "Belgian" or a "Swiss" voice, and we do not claim that a setting turns "soixante-dix" into "septante" on the fly across your figures. Doing it properly would mean guessing, number by number, whether "80" should become "huitante" or "quatre-vingts" depending on your reader's canton, which no text tells us. Our stance is to read well the French you write, and to leave you control of the form where it carries a regional meaning. It is less spectacular than a promise of a local accent, but it is true, and a Belgian or Swiss publisher prefers a tool that says what it does to a tool that plays a local it is not.

If you serve both audiences with the same articles, the right test is your own: take a text with a 70, a 90 and an amount, and listen. A minute will tell you where to write the word rather than the digit, and the rest of your blog will follow the same rule without a second thought.

Read next

• Adding audio to a WordPress.com site: what works depending on your plan
• How many credits one audio costs, and how to know before you make it
• French isn't read the way it's written: what that asks of a synthetic voice