Paroles (Lyrics)
Les paroles complètes de « Frère Jacques » avec traduction en anglais.
Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines! Ding, ding, dong. Ding, ding, dong.
#English translation
Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, Brother John? Brother John? Morning bells are ringing! Morning bells are ringing! Ding, ding, dong. Ding, ding, dong.
#Frère Jacques at a glance
- Country of origin
- 🇫🇷 France
- Sung in
- French
- Words by
- Traditional
- First known
- c. 1780
- Best for ages
- 2–8
- Mood
- playful, traditional
- Last updated
- 24 July 2026
How to sing it
- Teach everyone the whole tune first — it is only four short phrases and repeats twice.
- Split into two groups. The first group starts; the second waits until the first reaches "Dormez-vous?" and then begins from the top.
- Keep going round; with confident singers you can run three or four groups at two-bar intervals.
- Agree a finish before you start, or it never ends — usually each group stops after singing the whole song twice.
Meaning and origin
This is the song most children meet first when they learn that two people can sing different things at the same time and it can still sound good. That is not an accident — the melody was designed for it.
The joke is small and complete. Brother Jacques has slept through his one job. Somewhere in the monastery, matins is due, the bell has not been rung, and the singer is standing outside his door asking, with what one imagines is increasing pointedness, whether he is still asleep. Then the singer rings the bell themselves: ding, ding, dong. Four lines, one gently exasperated scene.
Nobody knows who wrote it. The earliest known appearance is in a French manuscript from around 1780, and there is no author’s name attached. It has since been translated into dozens of languages, usually with the sleeping friar intact — he is Bruder Jakob in German, Fra Martino in Italian, Martinillo in Spanish, and in the English version he becomes Brother John, whose name fits the tune better than Jacques does.
The reason it works as a round is structural. Each of the four phrases is written over the same harmony, so any phrase sounds correct against any other. Start a second group two bars behind the first and nothing clashes; start a third and a fourth and the texture just gets thicker. For a child, this is a genuinely startling discovery — that you can hold your own line while someone beside you sings something else, and that the two together make something neither of you could make alone.
Common questions
- What does Frère Jacques mean in English?
- It means "Brother Jacques" — a friar or monk. The song asks whether he is still asleep and tells him to ring the morning bells, so a fair prose translation is: "Brother Jacques, are you sleeping? Ring the morning bells! Ding, ding, dong."
- Why is Frère Jacques sung as a round?
- Because it is built to be. All four phrases use the same underlying harmony, so they still sound right stacked on top of each other. That means singers can start at four different points and the result is pleasant rather than chaotic — which is also what makes it a good first experience of singing in parts.
- What are "les matines"?
- Matins is the first prayer service of the monastic day, held very early in the morning. Ringing the bell to wake the community for matins would have been someone's job — and in this song, Brother Jacques has slept through it.
- Is Brother John a real person?
- There is no evidence for one. Several theories have been proposed over the years, none of them convincing. The likeliest explanation is the dullest: "Jacques" is simply a very common French name, standing in for any monk at all.
Sources
- Manuscript collection, Bibliothèque nationale de France (c. 1780)
- Wikipedia — Frère Jacques
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A8re_Jacques
- www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q825728
