The Canadian Style has been archived and won’t be updated before it is permanently deleted.
For the most up-to-date content, please consult Writing Tips Plus, which combines content from Writing Tips and The Canadian Style. And don’t forget to update your bookmarks!
In Canada, English documents often contain French-language words, phrases, names, titles, quotations, abstracts and bibliographic references. This appendix gives the basic rules of French typography. If you follow them when writing or revising, you will ensure that French-language material is correctly presented.
For further information, see Le guide du rédacteur.1
___________________
(a) Use upper-case letters; do not use periods:
(b) Do not retain the accent on initial letters:
(c) The gender of an acronym is normally that of the initial noun:
But acronyms from another language take the gender of the French equivalent of the generic noun:
(d) Use a period with the abbreviations for Monsieur and Messieurs, but not with those for Madame and Mesdames:
but
When inserting any of these abbreviations into English text, add a period:
© Public Services and Procurement Canada, 2024
TERMIUM Plus®, the Government of Canada's terminology and linguistic data bank
Writing tools – The Canadian Style
A product of the Translation Bureau