Feelings Unleashed: Expressing Emotions in French

Expressing emotions and feelings in French involves using a rich set of vocabulary and phrases that convey different emotional states. French speakers often use specific emotion-related verbs, adjectives, and expressions to articulate their feelings clearly.

Common Emotion Words in French

• Happiness: heureux/heureuse, joyeux/joyeuse, content(e)
• Sadness: triste, déprimé(e)
• Anger: en colère, fâché(e)
• Fear: avoir peur
• Surprise: surpris(e)
• Love: aimer, adorer
• Anxiety: anxiété, angoisse

Phrases to Express Feelings

• I feel happy: Je me sens heureux/heureuse.
• I am sad: Je suis triste.
• I am angry: Je suis en colère.
• I am scared: J’ai peur.
• I am surprised: Je suis surpris(e).
• I love this: J’adore ça.

Additional Notes

• French also uses non-verbal communication and interactional means to express emotions.
• Intensifiers and descriptive figures of speech like metaphors are commonly used to enhance emotional expression in colloquial French.
• The choice of emotion words can also differ based on context, such as business discourse or informal conversation.

This vocabulary and usage help learners articulate a wide range of emotional experiences in French, from simple feelings to more nuanced emotional states.

References

• Expressing emotions, discussing controversial issues: a pilot study focused on veganism

• Sifting French Tweets to Investigate the Impact of Covid-19 in Triggering Intense Anxiety

• Linguistic approaches to emotions in context

• Modelling Translation as a Theatre of the Mind: reporting clauses and inward affect

• Differend in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

• Conceptualization of “happy-like” feelings in Japanese and its relevance to a semantic typology of emotion concepts

• New model for emotion detecting from French text using bidirectional long short-term memory

• THE ROLE OF FIGURES OF SPEECH IN CONTEMPORARY COLLOQUIAL FRENCH

• 13. Disturbing Memories. Narrating Experiences and Emotions of Distressing Events in the French Wars of Religion

• Les émotions au sein du commentaire journalistique

• Linguistic ways of expressing emotions in French business discourse (based on business media texts)

• Graphic Realization of Phonetic Expressive Means of Emotivity (Based on the Works of Fiction of Modern French, English and German Authors)

• Actancial Structures and Discursive Profiles of the Combinations of Emotion Verbs in French and Arabic

• Une méthode d’approche de l’émotion dans le discours et les interactions

• Norms of Emotional Valence, Arousal, Threat Value and Shock Value for 80 Spoken French Words: Comparison Between Neutral and Emotional Tones of Voice

• Word Affect Intensities

• Teaching Affects in French as a Foreign Language. A Trial focusing on Intensifiers in Collocations

• French-speaking children’s freely produced labels for facial expressions

• Cross-Cultural Calibration of Words and Emotions: Referential, Constructionist, and Pragmatic Perspectives

• WordNet-feelings: A linguistic categorisation of human feelings