The paper presents a study of the universal and specific intonational features in Russian and French utterances, which appears important both for solving applied tasks of automatic speech synthesis and for identifying the linguodidactic foundations of teaching a foreign language. The material for the study included audio tracks of contemporary French films, freely available podcasts, as well as audio recordings of authentic study guides. The results of this experimental study suggest that the traditionally recommended model with the descending tone movement from the beginning to the end of the utterance is not the only possible one in the modern French language. When analyzing special questions with different syntactic organizations, it was demonstrated there were also other ways of melodic arrangement, including the use of even and ascending tones. We can also testify to the universality of the use of melody to convey emphatic meanings. By way of contrast, the falling-rising contour, similar in melodic arrangement, has different meanings in Russian and French. The experimental data obtained indicate that this contour appears to be one of the ways of expressing some emotional meanings in French, unlike in Russian, where the rising-falling tone movement is characteristic of emotionally neutral utterances.