What prompted my OP was a memory of something that happened in Europe many years ago.
My family was on one of those bus-around-Europe-with-a-group tours, and among our group were a couple of women from Montreal. They spoke both French and English.
Anyway, in Paris (or maybe it was Nice), there was a problem at a café where we were eating. I don’t remember what, exactly, it was, but I do remember asking our Canadian companions to help out. They steadfastly refused. Both said something to the effect of “Canadian French is so different that they wouldn’t understand us.”
I wasn’t buying it. For one thing, American English and English English have striking differences, but everyone in London understood me perfectly. For another thing, pain is bread, eau is water, buerre is butter, whether in Montreal, Paris, Marseilles, or New Orleans.
Vos is the second person singular, considered archaic in Spain but still found in some parts of Latin America nowadays - Argentina, Uruguay, most of Central America and to some extent in Colombia. The level of formality/informality varies according to country. In some places it replaces tú, in others it exists alongside it and can be more or less formal.
Vosotros is the informal second person plural and is not used in Latin America, only in Spain (less so in the south). Ustedes, which in Spain is the formal second person plural is used for both informal and formal address in Latin America. However, it is taught at school, at least here in the Dominican Republic where it featured in my second grader’s Spanish language textbook.
Back on topic, I learned European French and even though it is very rusty now I can still understand it quite well. I have no problems understanding my French Canadian friends, or Haitians when they speak French (as opposed to Kreyol, which as has been mentioned is not the same thing at all).
You’re quoting the sports section, though. Even though it’s written, the style is closer to the vernacular. Let me clarify: the author of the text you quoted wouldn’t use those words if he was writing an academic essay. I should have specified that the more formal the writing is, the more likely a Canadian writer is to seek to avoid English words.
I just wanted to add that les tetes a claques that jovan mentioned is some of the funniest shit I have seen in a long time. French speakers (especially Canadian ones) should definitely check it out.
I hadn’t checked the site in a while (truth be told, I think it gets pretty repetitive), but I found a clip that’s spectacularly à propos for this thread: *Napoléon le magnifique*, the greatest Franco-Québécois co-production of all time!
(For those who don’t understand French, the joke is that Napoleon is played by a Québec actor and his officer doesn’t understand a word he’s saying. The subtitles vaguely translate what he’s saying in Québec slang into French slang.)
Fair enough. The thing is that we usually don’t have a problem understanding the French, unless they’re making an effort to use obscure slang words. Most of the regional accents from France don’t give us any special difficulty. So why isn’t the reciprocal true? I guess the answer might be that we’re more exposed to French accents (from films and the like) than the other way around.
Indeed it isn’t.
I’m not hostile toward the French. I may be wrong, but my impression is that the French still don’t entirely see Canadian francophones as a people (or actually peoples) equal to them, but rather as “little cousins in the wilderness, lost in America”, so to speak. I guess I’m having trouble expressing exactly what I’m trying to say. But I found this quote interesting:
Interesting comment, Epiplexed. If you find a reference for this, I’d really like to see it. (I don’t remember thinking of France French as especially “nasal”, myself.)
That’s not something I would have said, myself. If I’m in France I’ll certainly speak French and expect to be understood. But this thread makes me wonder if maybe they weren’t right.
I’ve been speaking West African French for the last two years as my daily and working language, but I have no training and almost no exposure to French-French.
I am totally useless around French people. Most of the people I know here do better than I do, but damned if I can understand a word they say. Whenver I meet French tourists, I end up talking to their drivers and tour guides because I just don’t share a language with the French.
The biggest difference is accent. West African French is relatively slow and clear and suprisingly compatable with an American French accent. Grammer is also simplified- we never get much more complicated than passe compose. There is a different cadence and tonal qualities are quite different.
There are a few echos of local lanugages, which you find in all of the second languages- French, English and Fulfulde. Like, to emphasize an ajective you say it twice (Give me the small-small bread. Donne moi le petit petit gateux. Hokku am baret petal petal.) Questions in any language are usually formed by putting the question word last (The price is how much? Ca c’est combien? Dala noy?)
There are some occassional vocab difference. I spent a while confused before I learned that “gateaux” was a type of white bread and that “devoirs” are not homework but exams. Up here there are quite a few loan words from Fulfulde (the main street language but still most people’s second language). The only word for “river” we use here is “mayo.” Some words get more play than they would in France…I use “deranger” at least twenty times a day. And there are some expressions that you probably wouldn’t get away with in Paris. “C’est comment?” is the standard greeting.
I’m really interested to see what happens if I ever go to France. It’s a wierd thing to be kind of fluent in a language but also very much not.
I had five years of French immersion and four years of French classes in Winnipeg (c’est merveilleux, c’est magnifique), and came out of it with 95s and a brash confidence I could speak French.
Arrived in Montreal, where I abruptly learned that for some reason, the French that they had chosen to teach Canadian children was not Canadian French. (Because it’s not like there are any French-Canadians in Manitoba.) That was an adjustment experience, but I now speak fluent Québécois French.
Sample dialogue from a recent trip to Europe:
me: “…où j’ai rencontré mon hôte.”
France French speaker: “Ton comment?”
me: “Mon hôte.”
FFS: “Je ne te comprends pas.”
me: “Mon hôte! Le gars avec qui j’reste!”
FFS: “Ahh, ton hotte.”
me: “Ben non, criss, une hotte ça s’met au-d’ssus du four !”
Apparently in France they’re not real big on circumflex accents.
(Bolding mine) What does this reference? I believe I’ve heard other people who took French as a second language classes say this too, is it something you had to repeat in your classes?
Of course, Mario Lemieux is Le Magnifique and Wayne Gretzky (The Great One) is known in French as La Merveille, but I don’t think it’s related. Or is it?
It’s from this amazingly goofy educational TV show by TVOntario called Téléfrançais, long a staple of second-language French classrooms across the country. The protagonist is an anthropomorphic pineapple, named Ananas, who lives in a junkyard.
Not much more than between English speakers from the UK and the US. Any educated Spanish speaker is fully aware of these variations. Even if Latin Americans don’t use vosotros in their everyday speech they will understand what’s going on when a Spaniard uses it, and will also know how to conjugate it. An Iberian Spanish speaker will either know in advance that Latin Americans use ustedes for both formal and informal 2nd person plural, or they will just wonder why the person is being so excessively polite.
The ‘vos’ conjugation is less familiar e.g. *- tú tienes ~ vos tenés - *but it’s easy enough to adapt to.
I think, by growing up and learning French here in Québec, that I missed out on something FUN! I’ve heard countless references to this show, but I’ve never seen it. Though it might be more fun as adults than it was as a kid!
Well, I must admit that I’ve never been over there, thus the only contact I’ve had with canadians were students that came to Paris, or had been there for a while, meaning they still had the accent but apart from the odd turn of phrase here and there, they mostly spoke France French.
However, I’m a fan of the Quebec rock group “Les Cowboys Fringants”. They sing in Canadian French with a quite a bit of local slang and idioms, and there’s about 1 or 2 words per verse I don’t know. Some songs, I just don’t understand at all. But the music’s good, so…
jovan’s point is correct though : I know French was forcefully standardized, I know there’s still a lot of resentment going on about that in France, and I didn’t mean offense at all by saying we French feel as though Canadian French sounds archaic.
It is true that there are still a lot of French patois out there, and lots of hard to understand accents as well. There are also differences in the slang used in the North of France, the East, the South and Paris (example : in the Lilles region, they call a car “une cigarette”. I never could figure that one out.).
But the OP specifically asked for Parisian input, and Parisians are full of conceit and refuse to acknowledge the existence of any part of France that lies outside the Boulevard Périphérique* anyway
(that’s the highway that goes around the city to link Paris itself to its multitude of suburbs)
I’ve heard countless references to this show, but I’ve never seen it. Though it might be more fun as adults than it was as a kid!