Very interesting.
Merci!
I think not; people would just laugh at you. Stick with “putain de bordel de merde” &c.
A bit of a side track here, but apparently my accent is so bad that poutine sounds like putain. This is an uncomfortable problem to discover on your first on-site with coworkers in Montreal.
Probably not that uncommon but I’ll take the flack for saying it like like they do in BC, ending with a ‘TEEN’ from now on.
It is, and I will join in saying merci, Hypnagogic Jerk!
I learned Mexican Spanish, and lived in Mexico for five years. It was always a struggle to watch Spanish movies with their Madrid accents. Then I went to Barcelona for a week, and it was nothing at all like the Spanish movies. No lisps, and perfectly good vocabulary. Never did find good Mexican food there, though.
Oddly enough, one of the multitude of language-related YouTube channels that I watch released a video about this very topic recently!
After watching this video, I have to say, I’d be surprised if the French and Quebecois could understand each other at all.
Which “Spanish movies with their Madrid accents”? There’s Spanish movies with Madrid accents, with Bilbao accents, with Málaga accents, with Barcelona accents, with… AARGH!
God, it’s like hearing someone complain “I can’t watch American movies with their Brooklyn accents”.
When I was in high school, many moons ago, I went to see the Quebec movie “Mon Oncle Antoine” with my father and stepmother. She’s spent a while in France, and she laughed at one point in the movie and said the subtitle was not quite right -instead of “get up you old drunk” the character had said something like “Get up thou drunken fool…”
But then, a decent amount of back and forth was stifled when Quebec became a British colony in the 1760’s, so without as much of an upper class administration imported from France, no wonder the language evolved a lot less. Newfoundland seems to have done the same with the English language.
I think I linked to this video (or rather to the Quebec subreddit thread about it) earlier in this thread. Remember that these videos always compare formal, written French (which nobody really speaks) to colloquial varieties of a particular dialect (often Quebec French). It also chooses one particular expression both for the formal and for the colloquial examples, when in reality there are several ways to say what you want to say. If you saw a similar video comparing formal French to colloquial French spoken by a particular social group in some region of France, you’d probably conclude the French cannot speak French. Which is obviously ridiculous. Of course French people and Quebecers understand each other fine.
If you exclude Alsatian, Basque, Corsican, etc…, there were three language families in France : Oïl languages in the North, Oc languages in the south, and Franco-Provençal in an area around Lyon in the East.
While oïl languages were very similar to standard French, oc languages were significantly different (Franco-Provençal was a bit intermediary), and I think (my own observation based on very little actual knowledge) that there were more differences within the Oc family than within the Oïl family. So, for instance, someone speaking Picard would have easily understood someone speaking Gallo (both Oil languages) and someone speaking Provencal could have understood with some efforts someone speaking Limousin (both Oc languages), but for a Picard, Provençal would have been a foreign, not intelligible, language.
I wrote in the past tense because in practice local dialects (apart precisely from those you exclude : Alsatian, Corsican…) have dissapeared. First the oil languages, easily absorbed in standard French, then the Oc languages, that resisted much longer. I was raised up in the 70s in a small village in a very rural and even backward area. Even then, French was already the usual language. Old people would still speak Occitan between themselves, adults would generally be able to understand it and could speak it a little if pressed, children at best would understand it. Nowadays, I essentially never hear it, apart maybe from a couple words here and there. Few people can still understand it, and even fewer are native speakers (used it within their family when they were kids). And that’s for a small village. In urban areas, even small towns, Occitan had dissapeared even before I was born.
In fact, my signature is in Lemozi Occitan.
Note that in many European countries (Italy, Germany, Spain…), contrarily to France, regional dialects and alive and well and are the regular everyday languages.
Just to add that regional accents too are fading away in France. While you still can identify someone from Provence by his accent, the famous Ch’ti accent for northern France isn’t very noticeable anymore, and I’m now very surprised when I hear (normally from an elderly and rural person) the Auvergnat accent that was equally recognizable.
Just to clarify something : regional languages in France weren’t a continuum where for instance language would change progressively as you walked north. There was a linguistical barrier between Oc and Oil languages, not different from what you see between different countries. A Berrichon speaker could have exchanged with a Picard speaker from 500 km away to the North, but would have been unable to understand the Limousin speaker living just across the river.
And it was the same things for the other languages spoken in France you listed. In Britanny, people might speak Gallo (close to French) in a village and Breton (Celtic language) in the next.
Frenchie here, and you can put me down as opining with everything **clairobscur **just said.
My summarized response to this OP would be that official and high-register Quebec French is quite similar to modern official French apart from a handful of “antiquated” grammatical forms ; but otherwise perfectly understandable (and vice versa). Vernacular Quebecois however often might as well be Moon Language, since they include a million barely Frenchified English words (which are OK if you speak English, but many France French only believe they do
) and a million more slang words that evolved over there and not here.
Also their accent is weird and endlessly funny to us. You know how all y’all Anglos think French people speak in overly nasal tones ? We’re not sure Quebecois have any air passage *but *the nose. I expect the reverse is true and we sound like drawling Texan hicks to them, I’unno.
To illustrate what I’m saying, I will paste the lyrics to a song I like by Quebec band Les Cowboys Fringants, bolding the words that a France French person would simply not understand and in red the weird (to us !) grammar, or idioms that are intelligible but just… odd (and often that seem to come straight from the 1850s). The most salient and noticeable feature of Quebec French is how they completely elide articles sometimes (but not all the time, and I have no idea what the rules are) :
I will never forget the way my (Auvergnat) grandfather pronounced the word “année”. He’d say “an Nnée”, with the “an” as in “enfant” rather than, well, “année” :). But my father doesn’t and I, being a filthy Parisian, don’t either. Grandma and grandad both spoke Auvergnat patois fluently (Grandpa would even tell us fireside stories first in patois, then translated with maaayybe a trace of disdain) ; Dad sometimes uses a patois word ironically, I don’t speak it at all.
That being said, sometimes they sneak through : a couple months ago I learned that the verb “écampousser”, which my maternal grandmother used liberally and that I, too, have been known to us, was not a charming if outdated French expression but hardcore Francomptois, and that nobody outside my family knew what the fuck I meant by that. And nobody’d ever told me !
(FTR, it means “telling someone gently but firmly that they need to leave”. In fact, it almost literally translates as “to enoffpush” :))