A friend of mine got IM’s from a French-speaking gentleman last night, and used the word “famme” where most would use “femme”. Googling, I found several hits, but my French isn’t good enough to discern if this is a standard slang-word, a typo, or if it is its own word with its own unique connotation. Any hints?
I’m not fluent, but I don’t recognize the word. Maybe English isn’t the only language where people misspell things phoenetically. 
It’s a typo. “famme” doesn’t exist in french (barring an unlikely quebecois slang word or somesuch).
Does your friend know for sure that the gentleman is indeed French?
I’d say he just doesn’t know how to spell “femme.” Especially since the way you’d say “famme” (fahm) is how “femme” is pronounced. That is, “femme” is pronounced “fahm,” not “fehm.” La Femme Nikita notwithstanding. Kind of like the hideous “Moo-Lawn Rooje.”
Feh.
Femme is pronounced “fam” with a very short a - like “family” but a little shorter. So “famme” would be a reasonable misspelling, although in fact I’ve never seen it. This is probably because other related words such as femelle and féminin clearly pronounce the “e” sound.
I’ve certainly heard “femme” pronounced that way in English-speaking countries (“femme fatale”), but never in French-speaking ones.
I googled it out of my own curiousity, and I only found a couple of personals-type sites where the word “famme” was in the context of ungrammatical French (Nous chercher un famme, je parlé un petit français…). So my vote is for typo as well.
ArchiveGuy: You’re saying you’ve heard “femme” pronounced like [fam] in English-speaking countries but not French-speaking ones? Go here, type in femme, select Alain or Juliette, and listen to the way they say it. Is that what you mean? The vowel doesn’t sound exactly like the [a] in “family”, but if you make one of the US English-speaking people say “femme”, you’ll definitely hear a difference between the French [fam] and the US English [fEm].
That is my new favorite website! I think I will spend the rest of the day making Alain, Juliette and friends say made-up words. My favorite so far is “glaaraarraaraarraarrraugh”
Found this on newsgroups:
Rough translation:
Why do you sometimes read, ‘fAmme’ [instead of ‘femme’]?
Because in the Middle Ages, it was pronounced “fan-me” (see [like] “em” pronounced as “an” in “empoigner”) and because the 16th Century’s denazilisational form [is that even a word in English?] before a nasal consonant gives “fame” (like “ami” goes from “an-mi” to “ami”).
Be gentle with me, Clairobscur and other natives 
If I was chatting to someone in French on IM and they used ‘famme’ instead of ‘femme’, I’d have trouble believing that they were French.
The famous (ish) line from the end of Godard’s “Une Femme est une Femme” illustrates this pretty well «* Je ne suis pas infâme. Je suis une femme* »
Also, I kind of agree with Ponster “famme” is an unlikely typo for a native speaker - more likely to be a non-native’s mistake. OTOH it could be a typo for flamme, or some other word.
That was exactly my feeling also, but the OP merely says that the correspondent was a French-speaking person.
I’m not so sure - many (native) francophones that I’ve met seem to have a very high tolerance for faulty spelling in e-mails etc. We would have to see the rest of the message to judge conclusively.
Yeah, but think about it; it’s the word for ‘woman’ - a word most native Francophones will have been highly exposed to for their entire lives; I’m sure there will be those that misspell it, but I’d imagine it would be quite uncommon.
Many of you guys spell wimmin, and I don’t doubt you’re anglophones 
Well, quite, but in most cases, that will either be a jokey affectation (and obvious as such), or it will be genuine but accompanied by a broad range of literacy issues (in which case it won’t stand out as remarkable).
If it was the sole conspicuous and consistent spelling mistake, I’d be inclined to wonder what was going on.
I have not heard the word “femme” pronounced as “fam” with the A sounding like the A in “family,” which to me is the same A as the A in pan, clan, stand. Of course the way I pronounce “family” might be different from how someone from some other part of the U.S. pronounces it.
You might be thinking of a more nasal “a” sound than what I’ve heard. The “a” sound at the beginning of “femme” is more like a softer (but clipped) “ah” sound to my ears.
The /a/ in femme is between the /a/ in family and the /a/ in car. We really don’t have an equivalent in English, which might account for some of the disagreement in this thread. It’s not a nasal vowel either, like you see in the word faim.
Can I get a native speaker’s ruling on the validity of that text-to-voice link I provided? The French pronunciation sounds right to my [non-native-but-currently-studying-French-especially-French-phonetics] ears.