appartenir

A common, essential verb meaning to belong — to a person (ce livre m'appartient), a group or category (appartenir à un parti), or in the impersonal construction il appartient à quelqu'un de faire quelque chose (it is up to/incumbent upon someone to do something), a more formal way of saying it's someone's responsibility.

• Cette maison appartient à mes grands-parents. — This house belongs to my grandparents.
• Il appartient au gouvernement de trancher. — It is up to the government to decide.
• Nous appartenons tous à la même génération. — We all belong to the same generation.

Appartenir conjugates like tenir (j'appartiens, il appartient, nous appartenons) — learners who don't know tenir's irregular pattern often try to regularize it as if it were a simple -ir verb.

• quote "La Terre n'appartient pas à l'homme, c'est l'homme qui appartient à la Terre" — A widely quoted environmental saying in French, commonly attributed to Chief Seattle or Sitting Bull (the exact attribution is disputed by historians), still cited today in ecological and indigenous-rights discourse.