Random question 1: How big is the difference between the French spoken in France and the French spoken in Canada?
Is it like Australian English vs American English? For some reason I’m under the impression that there is a bigger difference but they are still mutually intelligible.
[I just this second realised I have no clue why I think that, hence random question 1]
It’s not as big a gulf as German and Pennsylvania Dutch is it?
Random question 2: What about Spanish in the America’s vs in Spain (not counting Catalan)?
Random question 3: When these languages are taught in US schools, if there is a significant difference, are kids taught Candian French/N+S American Spanish or the original flavour?
Is question 3 incredibly ignorant, like asking if people are taught South African English vs New Zealand English? (Although even then… alot of ESL people I know were very definitely taught American English or British English at school, so maybe it is a valid question)
PS. Where’s the freaking spellcheck button and why am I too blind to spot it??
The spoken languages are quite different. Think of the difference between Parisian French and Montreal French as somewhat like London and Texas English. Notice that I wrote “Parisian”. There are several dialects of French in France itself. This situation used to be much more extreme until the 19th century or so, when there were very aggressive efforts by the French government to normalize the language throughout the country. Canadian French grew out of regional dialects that were different from the one that became modern standard French.
Apart from the very noticeable differences in accents, there are several differences in vocabulary. Think of what “lift”, “fag” or “flat” mean in England vs. the U.S. Some of the expressions that are used in Canada are considered archaic in France, though as I wrote this is probably more because Canadian French comes from dialects that have largely been erased than because Canadian French is itself archaic.
French Canadians have absolutely no difficulty understanding Parisian French, or any European dialect. The opposite is not true, however. This is entirely a problem of exposure: French Canadians watch French movies, and sometimes even television, and there are many French French living in Quebec. French people who spend a little time in Canada tend to get used to the accent fairly quickly, at least mostly.
The written language is another thing, though. Apart from certain occasional stylistic differences, it will be very difficult to tell if a formal text was written by a French or a Canadian. There are no differences in spelling, as there is in English. French Canadians are taught using French dictionaries and grammar books.
I’d like to stress that there are various degrees to dialects. There are people in Quebec who speak very much like Parisians, this has traditionally been called “chastised French”. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who speak in accents so thick that anyone who isn’t from the same town is going to have a hard time understanding what they’re saying.
2.- My personal division in accent groups has more to do with phonetics (main groups would be “Southern,” with lots of seseo; “Northern,” with a clear distinction between Z and S; “Rioplatense,” which sounds like it was born from a mixture of Italian and Galego… and there’s some accents which don’t fit there, like those Madrileños who sometimes turn the S into a J) than with geography. I’ve met Colombians who sounded eerily similar to my own Northern Spanish; one who told me about spending the summer with his Grandma in Seville when he was 15 and meeting for the first time people who spoke like his father… and cousins who laughed at him for sounding “like the folks on TV.”
We understand each other’s accents just fine. The only problem is having different words, or words which are dirty in one place but clean in others; this gets solved very fast with a bit of goodwill.
3: what’s taught is whatever the teacher speaks. If you got me, you’d hear a “Northern” accent, probably end up using -ico for your diminutives, and learn “the dictionary version” for any item of which I know both “dictionary” and “local” versions(1). If you got Ale, who is from Uruguay, you’d have people asking whether you’re from Argentina.
(1): apricot. Go to a dictionary, get “albaricoque.” Ebro Valley between Alfaro and Zaragoza, “alberge.” Pamplona, “albérchigo.” Córdoba, “damasco.” Bet it has 50 more names I just don’t know.
ETA:
This isn’t 100% true for Spanish, but almost. There are some spelling errors which are more common in people of certain accents; there are some verbal differences as well which are likely to pop up, specially if the writer doesn’t know that using that verbal form is a peculiarity of his region.
Some French colleagues were visiting the US and rented a car with a sat nav system. The system could be configured for English or French. They thought the Canadian French accent from the sat nav was hilarious.
As a Canadian who went to school in French, I will second jovan’s analysis, though I note that once in a while, there comes a Frenchman I have trouble understanding – I’m still trying to figure out if it’s people from a particular region.
Thanks for all the info guys. Of course there would be different regional accents and dialects - duh! why didn’t that occur to me! It’s especially interesting that written formal French is more similar than the spoken dialects.
I can completely relate to how French Canadians understand (most) French accents but not vice versa due to media saturation. I always find it amusing when S. African English accents are subtitled on British and American television when they’re just speaking English (excluding slang of course.) But yes, the US&UK media doesn’t often feature S. African’s speaking accented English so many can’t understand them, whereas I’ve seen SA, UK and US television all my life and can easily understand all the accents.
I always find it amusing when my Brit friends tell me how strong my mum’s SA accent is, when living as long as we have among them, she sounds extremely posh and upper crust compared to our family back home. I can barely note a twang and some of them think she’s unintelligible!
And sometimes even within Canada there are regional differences. For example, when I was studying French in Nova Scotia (Acadian country), I picked up the habit of saying “je ne suis point” instead of “je ne suis pas”. When I used that later with québécois, they asked me what century I had learned my French in.
This is one of the big differences between French and Canadian French - the swear words in Canadian French tend to lean heavily towards terms from the Roman Catholic church. Two of the biggest are “tabernac” - from the tabernacle that holds the reserved host; and “estie” - the host itself.
Prior to a trip to Vienna, I took a Continuing Ed course in German. The instructor told me that the Viennese would be able to understand me, but I’d have trouble understanding their German. He was right.
Sorry for responding to this thread late, I just resubscribed now. The thing is that Acadians are a distinct ethnic group, who as far as I know came from other regions of France from the other francophones in Canada, so it’s not surprising that they have their own distinct dialect. The Wikipedia article on Acadian French presents some of the particularities of this dialect. I’m not surprised to hear that they sometimes use point instead of pas; Acadian French includes words that would be archaisms in other French-speaking countries (so does Quebec French, for that matter).
You can also hear a noticeable difference between the French spoken in Quebec and by the minority francophone communities in Ontario and Western Canada. (It’s very noticeable to me anyway.) I find it’s mostly a difference in accent, but the vocabulary is also different, and as you may expect the minority francophones’ speech shows a greater influence of English. For example, one of my friends, who’s Franco-Ontarian, uses cuire to mean cuisiner. It’s true that both words are translated in English as “to cook”, but it conjures images of people slowly broiling in the oven. :eek:
See [post=9897665]this post[/post]. That’s really more of a stereotype, and while these words are in fact heavily used (in informal contexts), there are many other differences between the French spoken in France and in Canada.
Jovan’s reply makes me think the differences between Parisian and Montreal are akin to the differences between many Scottish dialects and many American accents.
People will differ on the particulars, but it seems to me that Scottish dialects, collectively, are more challenging to this American than English dialects. The amount of slang and regional colloquialisms used can tip the scales one way or another, of course.
In addition to being influenced by English, there’s also regional differences in French vocabulary. I was talking with some fransaskois colleagues on this issue a while ago, and they mentioned that they use different words for some western Canadian fauna than are used in Québec French - not anglicisms, but French words that have come into use here in western Canada over the centuries that francophones have lived here. (I think the two examples they mentioned were their terms for “gopher” and “rattlesnake.”) They were occasionally irritated when Québécois colleagues told them that their terms weren’t “proper” French. Hmm, you’d think that people who live in the area where you find gophers and rattlesnakes should be entitled to decide what to call them… :rolleyes:
“Eastern snootiness” is a unifying western Canadian theme, regardless of language.
Eh, maybe so, but given that many people (including some in Canada, and even in Quebec itself) insist that the French spoken in Quebec is just a patois of “real” French, I think we may be excused.
I’m joking, I wouldn’t think of telling people that the words they use aren’t “proper”, especially with these animal names that may vary a lot from locale to locale. I have a friend from the Magdalen Islands – and therefore probably of Acadian ancestry – who calls seals “loups marins”, literally “marine wolves”. They’re usually known as phoques in the rest of Quebec and (I guess) most francophone countries, but I find this term charming. And while I will admit that some of the terms used by Canadian francophones strike me as odd (notably this cuire thing), I know it’s just a dialectal difference.
That’s really more of a stereotype, and while these words are in fact heavily used (in informal contexts), there are many other differences between the French spoken in France and in Canada.