Avoiding Inversion


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Éviter l’inversion

Inversion is an essential verbal structure, but because it’s formal, it can make your French sound overly fussy. So outside of formal situations like job interviews and journalism, you need to know your options. Here are the most common ways to use inversion and grammatically correct ways to avoid it.

Questions

Using inversion in questions is elegant and perfect for formal situations. But outside of those sorts of contexts, it sounds stilted, so it’s important to know other ways to ask questions.

The most common way to ask questions is with est-ce que, which is normal register and therefore never wrong. In informal situations, you have a number of other options.

Par example…

Êtes-vous prêts ?		Are you ready?
Est-ce que vous êtes prêts ?
Vous êtes prêts ?

Direct speech

The standard way to report what someone said is with "incidental clause inversion." You can avoid this by adding a meaningless relative pronoun que in front of the subject/verb instead.

Par exemple…

« Mange ton dîner » insiste-t-il. « Mange ton dîner » qu’il insiste.		"Eat your dinner," he insists.
« J’ai fait mes devoirs » m’a-t-elle dit. « J’ai fait mes devoirs » qu’elle m’a dit.		"I did my homework," she said.

Combien | Peut-être | Sans doute

When these phrases are at the beginning of a clause, they must be followed by inversion (for formal situations) or else the word que.

Par exemple…

Combien de temps que j’ai gaspillé.		I’ve wasted so much time.
Peut-être que tu as raison.		Maybe you’re right.
Sans doute qu’elle va y réussir.		Of course she’ll succeed.