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This detailed sketch talks about the orthography of the French language.

* Nasal: n and m. When n or m follows a vowel or diphthong, the n or m becomes silent and causes the preceding vowel to become nasalized (i.e. pronounced with the soft palate extended downward so as to allow part of the air to leave through the nostrils). Exceptions are when the n or m is doubled, or immediately followed by a vowel. The prefixes en- and em- are always nasalized. The rules get more complex than this but may vary between dialects.
* Digraphs: French does not only introduce diacritics to specify its large range of vowel sounds and diphthongs, but also uses specific combinations of vowels, sometimes with following consonants, to show which sound is intended.
* Gemination: Within words, double consonants are generally not pronounced as geminates in modern French (but geminates can be heard in the cinema or TV news from as recently as the 1970s, and in very refined elocution they may still occur). For example, illusion is pronounced [ilyzjɔ̃] and not [illyzjɔ̃]. But gemination does occur between words. For example, une info (”a news”) is pronounced [ynɛ̃fo], whereas une nympho (”a nympho”) is pronounced [ynnɛ̃fo].
* Accents are used sometimes for pronunciation, sometimes to distinguish similar words, and sometimes for etymology alone.
o Accents that affect pronunciation
+ The acute accent (l’accent aigu), é (e.g. école—school), means that the vowel is pronounced /e/ instead of the default /ə/.
+ The grave accent (l’accent grave), è (e.g. élève—pupil) means that the vowel is pronounced /ɛ/ instead of the default /ə/.
+ The circumflex (l’accent circonflexe) ê (e.g. forêt—forest) shows that an e is pronounced /ɛ/ and that an o is pronounced /o/. In standard French it also signifies a pronunciation of /ɑ/ for the letter a, but this differentiation is disappearing. In the late 19th century, the circumflex was used in place of s where that letter was not to be pronounced. Thus, forest became forêt and hospital became hôpital.
+ The diaeresis (le tréma) (e.g. naïf—foolish, Noël—Christmas) as in English, specifies that this vowel is pronounced separately from the preceding one, not combined and is not a schwa.
+ The cedilla (la cédille) ç (e.g. garçon—boy) means that the letter c is pronounced /s/ in front of the hard vowels a, o and u (c is otherwise /k/ before a hard vowel). C is always pronounced /s/ in front of the soft vowels e, i, and y, thus ç is never found in front of soft vowels.
o Accents with no pronunciation effect
+ The circumflex does not affect the pronunciation of the letters i or u, and in most dialects, a as well. It usually indicates that an s came after it long ago, as in île (island, compare with English isle).
+ All other accents are used only to distinguish similar words, as in the case of distinguishing the adverbs là and où (”there”, “where”) from the article la and the conjunction ou (”the” fem. sing., “or”) respectively.

Source: Wikipedia