Laravel localization in French Français

Locale codes

Set the base locale in config/app.php. For regional variants, French commonly uses: fr_FR, fr_CA, fr_BE, fr_CH

// config/app.php
'locale' => 'fr',
'fallback_locale' => 'en',

// Or switch at runtime
App::setLocale('fr');

Plural rules: what French actually needs

CLDR defines 3 cardinal categories for French. The sample numbers below were computed by ICU for this exact locale:

Laravel's trans_choice() maps numbers to 2 pipe-separated forms for this locale:

// lang/fr/messages.php
'items' => ':count item|:count items'

// Usage
trans_choice('messages.items', $count, ['count' => $count]);

Try any number live in the pluralization tester.

Localized dates with Carbon

Real output for French (fr locale), generated by Carbon for March 21, 2026:

$date = now()->locale('fr');

$date->translatedFormat('l, j F Y');
// "samedi, 21 mars 2026"

$date->isoFormat('LLLL');
// "samedi 21 mars 2026 14:30"

$date->isoFormat('L');
// "21/03/2026"

$date->subDays(3)->diffForHumans();
// "il y a 3 mois"

What to watch out for in French

• Tu/vous distinction; most product UI uses vous, but decide before translating.
• Nouns are gendered and adjectives agree; elision (l', d') makes article + placeholder concatenation fragile.
• French typography requires a (narrow non-breaking) space before : ; ! ? and inside « guillemets ».
• Decimal comma with space as thousands separator (1 234,56).

Framework strings already translated

Laravel's own validation, auth and pagination strings are maintained in French by the open-source Laravel-Lang project (MIT). Install them, then manage your app's own strings live:

composer require laravel-lang/common --dev
php artisan lang:add fr
php artisan lang:update