Some 2,000 French words will have new spellings when new textbooks are released in September for the 2016 academic year. Education officials and publishers have announced that even the circumflex—the little ˆ mark that sits atop certain vowels—will become optional for a lot of words. The most glaring changes include the spelling for onion—“oignon”—will now be acceptable as “ognon.” The changes were reportedly first approved by the Académie Française in 1990, but have only started appearing in official documents in recent years.
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