I’m currently taking full-time immigrant francisation courses in Montréal. The teachers have a lot of different accents. Our current prof is a Haitian who moved here thirty years ago as a teenager, has a PhD in linguistics, and seems to speak a fairly international French with a little bit of a Haitian accent as far as I can tell. Our TA for pronunciation and conversation practice (monitrice) is a native of Montréal with a definite Québec accent. Our TA for cultural integration issues (agent d’integration) grew up in Paris. While they do change how they talk in order to talk to confused immigrants with bad French like us, they don’t all try to speak alike - there are definite differences in pronunciation, preferred grammatical structures (especially for questions), and word choice. But we’re able to understand them all. Our monitrice says Parisians claim not to be able to understand her, though, especially when she asks for un pain brun.
As our course and most of our course materials were made by the Québec government, they tend to focus more on stuff that’s normal in Québec. (e.g., mitaines, not moufles) However, we do learn the European-French words as well. (plus some of the more common Joual words just so we have an easier time understanding people)
Oh, come on… they say sarcasm is lost on some people.
I don’t know… in the “real” French I learned in English Canadian high school, the last letter of French words is rarely pronounced. (Trois is “Trwah”) In Mulroney’s “French” he pronounced the “s” with a distinct hiss at the end of words. OTOH, he sounds like a pretentious bastard in English (oh, wait…) with for example the way he pronounced schedule “shed-yool” rather than “sked-jewel” like a real person.
Yah, I know Lyin’ Brian grew up bilingual; but so did Charest and many others, but they don’t sound like the French version of Sarah Palin to ingratiate tehmselves with voters. They speak formal (Parisian) French in formal settings. Chretien - well, the joke goes he’s the only Canadian Prime Minister in recent times that was not bilingual in either official language.
I recall a short story in school (translated from the real French, I think) about someone growing up in rural Quebec in the late 1800’s early 1900’s era. He said in an aside that the local school board preferred to hire teachers from France to teach “proper” French. Or maybe he said “real French” - I don’t recall. Anyway, Parisian French.
Even back then, the more upscale or pretentious types thought it was better their kids at least be exposed to Parisian French. In the story, the kid remarks that the bonus of having a teacher from France was that he did not know any English and did not bother to teach it.
We had a French teacher (as opposed to a Canadian teaching French) when I went to high school. After a mention in one of our textbooks, he discussed the different accents of France itself, where Paris is considered the “Gold standard”, much like Oxford English. He referred to “L’asang de marsay” -the way “L’accent de Marseilles” was described and pronounced.
So really - Quebec is French, like France. The words, grammar, etc. can be pronounced somewhat differently, but so can English from Scotland, Newfoundland, Southern USA, or Australia. If I understand correctly, in all these situations, the degree to which the regional accent overpowers the intelligibility to outsiders can vary - from ELiza Dolittle “My Fair Lady” which anyone can grasp, to Guy Ritchie’s “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” which is completely unintelligible at times. It also depends how much the person wants to “put on” the accent / colloquialisms or speak mainstream.
I like to remark to people that there are a billion people in the world who speak English, but only the 20 million in Canada who speak it right.
But yes, I have never heard any Quebecker suggest that the language is anything but French.
A Frenchman will not understand the local dialect, usually called Joual, after the local word for horse (French cheval). That said, all Quebecois can and will speak a more standard French.
My wife once took driving lessons. One lesson the student previous to her was French and the one after her was local. The instructor spoke what they call international French (which my wife, who lived in Paris for a year understood perfectly) to the first student, English to her, and local dialect, which my wife found incomprehensible, to the third.
This is very reminiscent of what happens in Barbados. All Bajans understand and nearly all are perfectly able to speak a “mid-ocean English”. But their local dialect sounds like a totally foreign language to me. I have also run into incomprehensible dialects in England and once met a highland Scot who gave me a sample of his dialect (of English, not Scots Gaelic) that I found totally incomprehensible. A German born colleague of mine spent a year in Switzerland and at the end of it was just coming to understand Schyzerdutsch.
You can ask the same question in all these cases. Different language or different dialect? There is really no answer.
I live in Quebec City. The French here is French. Sure there are accent changes
But it’s not like a Parisian couldn’t understand what is being said.
All French that is written in Quebec hasn’t any changes from French wriiten in France.
Now having lived in Louisiana also there’s quite bit of difference
I remember that. I also remember the scandal caused by Robert Charlebois with is song Lindbergh. First time somebody swore (sacrait) in a song. Here is a version of the song (look for the swearing at about 3:40).<snip>
Tell me about it. I have been trying for years to find the French (from France) version of Slapshot, named La Castagne to compare it with the Québec version called Lancer frappé
Trois is indeed pronounced /trwɑ/ (or possibly /trwɔ/ in Quebec French). In métis the ‘s’ is always voiced, it’s rather like /metis/ (or /met[sub]s[/sub]ɪs/ in Quebec French). (My IPA may not be entirely correct in those examples, but I trust you get the idea.)
Funny, I say “sked-jool”. Once again this is a difference in accent and not every English speaker pronounces words the same way you do.
Jean Charest doesn’t speak Parisian French. His accent is totally Canadian. Of course he speaks formal (Quebec) French in formal settings. So does Mulroney really. I haven’t heard him much recently, but he’s never struck me as speaking anything but formal Quebec French; unlike your claim he doesn’t sound like a yokel to me.
But I get it, you don’t like the guy.
You mean fluent in either official language. Of course it’s a joke, but his French is strange. I wouldn’t say he sounds like a yokel, his vocabulary is too sophisticated for that, but sometimes he sounds inappropriately informal. And his accent is weird.
Well yeah, that’s what matt_mcl said. Formerly any difference from Parisian French was seen as lower-class and ignorant. That’s not really true anymore, and it’s entirely possible to speak an educated form of Canadian French. Listen to Charest again. Does he really sound like a Parisian to you?
Is he the one who put those ideas about accents in your head?
Joual is Canadian French spoken with a very strong accent that you won’t really find very often, at least not in cities. If I actually do pronounce cheval as /ʒwal/, you know I’m being facetious. A more common pronounciation would be /ʃfal/. And of course, as you say, everybody is able to speak in different language registers. That’s not unique to Quebec; French people also speak differently depending on whether they’re in formal or informal settings.
Another thing I’d like to note about different French dialects and the teaching thereof: I’ve taken French classes in two places in Canada. One was at a for-profit language school in Ottawa where a lot of the focus was on helping people prepare for the (federal) government French exams for civil service positions. That was ALL France-French, to the point that NONE of the teachers were Québécois, all of the course materials were France-centric, and we were given no exposure to the Québec dialect. I like my current courses (as I’ve said, run by the Québec government for immigrants) a lot better - I need to be able to talk to my boyfriend’s crazy separatist grandma a lot more than I need to be able to talk to some Parisian. But I think it’s interesting that courses aimed at getting you to pass the federal government’s language proficiency tests don’t think it’s that important that you actually be able to understand Canadian francophones.
Interesting. I learned Parisian French, and it served me well in my travels in Europe. But when I took the federal government’s language proficiency tests about 25 years ago, it was all Quebec French. I did fine on the written tests–as has been noted here already, there isn’t much difference in the written language. But I didn’t do well on the orals. Maybe I should have spent some time in Quebec just prior to the tests, so I could have gained an ear for the Quebec accent.
Huh. I wonder if things have changed since then, or if this particular language school just had weird ideas. I hope it’s the latter. The only person I know who took the language tests recently is a Francophone who took them for English, though, so asking him won’t be much help. (Plus he’s a New Brunswick Acadian, so he talks funny anyway. )
Because I’m a geek this way, I decided to look them up. Some were bought out, a couple are dead.
Quebecair->Canadian Airlines-> Air Canada
Trans World -> (TWA) -> American Airlines
Western Air Lines -> Delta
Pan-American - Truly defunct, after being screwed over by Delta
Northern - my googling is weak. I can’t find the airline being referred to, but note that there is a Northern Cargo Airlines and a charter company called Northern Air out of Edmonton. There is also “Air North” out of the Yukon territory which has www.northernairlines.ca as a website, though the official one is www.flyairnorth.com. Northwestern Air still exists. North West Air (NWA) is now owned by Delta.
Eastern Air Lines - truly defunct, with supposed plans to be restarted, but no progress has been made on that front in many, many years.
This is entirely off the wall so please dont get too agitated about my post.
I am an Englishman who speaks school boy French,I can’t understand Swiss French speakers at all, can understand French people if they speak slower then normal but find French Canadians a lot easier to understand.
They sound to me like English people speaking French.
As France is a close neighbour of England they must get used to our not very impressive attempts(usually) to speak their language, so maybe thats why they have no difficulty understanding french Canadians.
I’m not putting this forward as an entirely serious theory,but I think that there may be some merit in it.
For those who object to my post about the uselessness of the term “real”:
Are you interested in fighting ignorance, or do you just want to be assured that you don’t have to learn anything new? The fact is that modern linguistics doesn’t recognize the usefulness of talking about one dialect being “real” and another being fake (or whatever distinction you wish to make). Québécois French and Parisian French are both dialects of French. There is no way from a strictly linguistic viewpoint that one of them is “better” or more “real” than the other. Parisian French is the standard language, in the sense that most people around the world who learn French as a second language learn it and that francophones from around the world tend to use it to communicate with each other. It’s possible to imagine alternate histories in which Québécois French became the standard language. For instance, suppose sixty years ago most of France had been completely destoyed by some horrific event, leaving the remaining country nearly depopulated. Then Quebec might have become the center for French-speaking world. Parisian French would have become to be considered just an odd, old-fashioned dialect.
And, as I said, I think that it’s often not a good idea to use the term “real” in many scholarly studies. People often come into an academic field with preconceived notions about what categories are useful in the field. Often they find out that those categories are much more vaguely defined than they thought.
As an American who speaks only a smattering of French, I agree that French Canadians are easier to understand than people from France for that very reason. The Parisian French accent seems further removed from the written word than does the Canadian French.
Either that, or Charlebois is jinxed. I know what explanation is more interesting!
Seriously though, maybe I’m wrong but I think that at the time people weren’t so used to seeing airlines go out of business. I don’t think the idea of PanAm, for example, failing, would have even entered most people’s minds.
I don’t know why, but even though I know Charlebois says “Northern”, when I sing the song in my head I always think it’s “Northeast”. I feel it fits the rhythm better anyway. And I had actually Wikipedia’ed the list of airlines before, and found out that there was a Northeast Airlines, which merged with Delta in 1972. (Delta bought a lot of air travel companies.)
To me Franco-Ontarians and other Canadian francophones outside Quebec (except Acadians) sound a bit like anglophones speaking French. That’s how my brain processes it, but it’s entirely subjective of course.
Depends what you mean by Parisian French. The informal dialect spoken by Parisians, say with their friends, isn’t the standard dialect of French. But the French language did start as the language of Paris only and was exported all over the world, so in that sense Parisian French is the standard and original dialect of French.
Let’s consider singer Zachary Richard, who is probably the only Louisiana French speaker that I know anything about, and who is quite well-known in Quebec. I hear traces of the Acadian accent in his, but it’s very different as well. He is entirely comprehensible, but of course given that many people who buy his albums are in Quebec he probably makes sure that what he says is understandable by other French speakers.
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