Nope, "Jean" is only a masculine name in France.UnsightlyWalrus wrote:Depends how you pronounce it. If you pronounce it like pants, then it's a girls name. But the actual pronounciation in this case is Sean.vampire hunter D wrote:Isnt Jean also a girls' name in France
Jean Michel Jarre is not a woman but very much a man who is also one of the fathers of electronic music.
It's the French form of "John" (Prince John Lackland = Prince Jean sans terre, St. John = St Jean...), and it's pronounced [ʒɑ̃] as Bambikles said, "ean" being a nasalized vowel that doesn't exist in English. It's NOT pronounced as in "James Dean" or "blue jeans".
The feminine form is actually spelt "Jeanne" (Joan of Ark = Jeanne d'Arc), and it's pronounced as in "Ann".
When they dub American or English movies into French, all the names that have a common French form with a nearly identical spelling (Richard, Arthur, Mark as Marc, Luke as Luc, Benjamin, Robert, Gilbert, Sarah, Elizabeth, Marie...) are always pronounced the way the French names are pronounced, while names like James, John, Jim, Sean or Peter would be pronounced the English way (or what a Frenchman imagines is the English way).
But for names like "Jean" or "Jules" which are feminine in English and always masculine in French, they would use more or less the English pronounciation, so as to avoid confusion. (So Djools instead of Jül.)
Recently, we're starting to have some French kids named Sean, too. But it did not exist when I grew up.