est-ce que
FrenchEdit
PronunciationEdit
ParticleEdit
- Used to introduce a yes-or-no question.
- Est-ce que tu veux une chambre ? ― Do you want a bedroom?
- Est-ce qu’elle est arrivée ? ― Has she arrived?
- Used after a preposed interrogative to introduce the remainder of the question.
- Quand est-ce que les élèves retournent à l’école ?
- When do the students return to school?
- Combien de musées est-ce qu’il y a en France ?
- How many museums are there in France?
Usage notesEdit
- Before a vowel, est-ce que becomes est-ce qu’:
- est-ce qu’elle
- est-ce qu’il
- In older forms of French, and in more formal registers of present-day French, the role of est-ce que is often fulfilled by subject-verb inversion:
- Quand viendrez-vous ? ― When will you come?
- In fact, est-ce que itself results from subject-verb inversion; it comes from c’est que — however, in modern French, est-ce que is a set phrase that does not necessarily function as the inversion of c’est que and the former can be used to introduce a question beginning with the latter:
- Est-ce que c'est que les hommes sont partis ?
- Have the men left?
- In colloquial French, yes-or-no questions are often indicated solely by punctuation (in writing) or intonation (in speech), with no special lexical or syntactic marker:
- T'es prête ? ― You ready?
- Similarly, non–yes-or-no questions often use the same structure as statements, with question words not being preposed:
- Il a dit quoi ? ― He said what?
- In informal or colloquial French, question syntax is often used instead of subject-verb inversion in indirect questions:
- Il veut savoir où est-ce qu’ils habitent.
- He wants to know where (it is that) they live.