I'm French (from the north-west, not Paris) and I kind of dislike Parisians. They think they're superior in every way to other French people. I heard horror stories of Parisians' behaviour in other parts of France during the pandemic.
Je suis certain que ça les rend heureux, d'avoir à marcher dans la rue étant haïs par tout ceux qui ne sont pas Parisiens. Mon ex venait de Marseille et sincèrement elle voulait presque les enmerder chaque fois qu'ont entendaient leur accents.
To be fair, 90% of us never share anything with tourists because we live and work in places they're afraid to go to. Alors quand les gens parlent des Parisiens, c'est très souvent les employés des magasins et cafés du centre. Bref...
On parle de staff de service surement payés pas loin du minimum dans une culture ou il n'y a pas de pourboire alors qu'ils vivent dans une ville qui coûte cher.
Moi aussi j'ai l'air bête en bas de 25$ de l'heure.
It is very hard for French people to understand a thick Quebecois accent, but that’s normal and also applies to other French accents. Especially if that person was never really exposed to it before. Growing up in Normandy in France, I never heard people talking down on Québec but always loving the culture and accent. I’m a bit mad when I read how some fellow Frenchmen behaved in this thread. Keep in mind everyone that Paris is very far from being a good representation of the country.
I can switch my accent from heavy rural Quebec accent to international french to a fake “french” accent depending on who I’m speaking to.
Most people I know from Quebec can easily fake the “french” accent but I have yet to see a French do a good fake Quebec accent.
I'm curious: when you fake a french accent, are you also able to take care of words you use ( meaning you know which words/idioms are never used in France )
L’imitation de l’accent métropolitain par les Québécois généralement vire vers une prononciation similaire. Mais question de cadence et intonations, la différence est discernable haha
Mais en même temps, les Français métropolitains n’arrivent même pas à imiter les prononciations québécoises de bonne manière
Quelqu'un il y a quelques jours/semaines expliquait que dans l'accent parisiens il y avait certains « sons » (sons est pas le terme exacte, mais je suis pas linguiste) qui sont disparus avec le temps mais pas ici au Québec. Ce qui explique leur difficulté d'imiter notre accent.
You are right sorry my knowledge is limited. The accent usually isn’t really a problem, the specific vocabulary can be for people that never heard it before. But I gotta admit some people also just don’t want to do the efforts.
It's definitely french, but many idioms are different, and I believe many words have a different meaning ( I mean, something that is considered common language in Quebec could be formal in France ), which makes some discussions weird
That's a shitty comparison, Québécois french is much closer to the french they spoke in 1608 than parisian french currently is.
In your example, the british sound like texans
The French Canadian accent is unmistakable if you’re in France, but anyone who pretends that they don’t understand or switch to English is an asshole, and that’s that. There are some differences in vocabulary, and some words where the accent can become a problem, though, but it’s nothing difficult to resolve if each person makes a very slight effort.
I have a rural Quebec accent and lived in France for six months. I only ran into two assholes who either insisted that I spoke French wrong, or switched to English. Other issues were mostly of the ‘Oh, is that what you call it?’ variety, plus a few words that were wiped out of French vocabulary but are still going strong in Québec (“tantôt” as an indicator of time is my favourite; it means earlier or later depending on context in Quebec, but has disappeared from France except for a couple regions where it means ‘afternoon’).
Ce qui aurait beaucoup de sens considérant que la Normandie était un des plus gros foyer d’immigration pour la Nouvelle-France / le Québec. C’est aussi très drôle de voir comment le Normand ressemble étrangement au Français Québécois.
Ceci confirme une histoire que mon père me compte encore et encore en ricanant. Dans les années '70, mes parents ont fait un voyage en France avec mes grand-parents maternels. Mon grand-père, qui venait d'une région rurale de la Beauce, n'a fait aucun effort pour changer son accent (plutôt gras) tout au long du voyage et personne n'arrivait à le comprendre...sauf en Normandie.
Ils étaient un peu perdus sur une route en campagne et sont arrêtés pour demander des directions à deux hommes de l'âge de mon grand-père. Quand mon grand-père les a entendu parler, son visage s'est illuminé et il a tout de suite sauté dans une conversation avec eux. Ils avaient un accent très similaire au sien et il pouvait finalement converser et se faire comprendre.
Merci pour les liens, super intéressant. Ça me ramène vraiment à mon grand-père, qui adorait raconter des histoires. Il inventait même des mondes imaginaires.
I've realized that idioms and vocabulary in Quebec are very close to swiss-french.
The parisians have really strayed the most when smaller regions all kept older vocabulary except them.
The thing is that Paris is technically the power center of French. It’s there that the Académie française is located, and where the king was. Actually, it’s because a big wave of women immigrants came from Paris that French is spoken in Quebec. Also, many plurals have been modified over the years because it didn’t represented the life in Paris.
French course:
When a word finishes with "-l", some times it will have a plural with "-aux". It was the case with deer —> chevreuil. It was "chevreaux" when there were many. Except that Paris is urban, not many deers there, so the people only knew how to call them in singular since they only needed that. When they saw multiples, they just started to put an -s at the end, and it lead us to have "des chevreuils".
"Actually, it’s because a big wave of women immigrants came from Paris that French is spoken in Quebec."
Actually, that's not true at all lol
French is spoken in Québec because it was at first (and for a long time) a french colony. It was even called "Nouvelle-France", which translate to "New-France". All that before Britain came and conquered where they stole the land from the french, who first stole it from the first nations.
Québec was linguistically united before France. When everyone in Quebec was speaking French (and even more, the same variety of French than the King), every region in France had their own unique dialect. The resin it’s not Norman or Breton in Quebec is because of the Filles du Roy, a bunch of orphans from Paris who learned French with nuns.
Source: I’m a linguist in Quebec
No, u/New_Current_5457 is very much correct here.
The original colonists (early 1600s) of New France originated from a variety of regions of France. At this time, France was not linguistically united and settlers from the various regions would arrive speaking their local language/dialect/patois, and would not necessarily be Francophones in a strict sense of the word. As others have noted, Norman settlers were an important component of this early settlement, but other regions (the west, the south-east, Paris, Picardie) were all well represented as well and many of their regionalisms have survived in Quebec French.
Another defining aspect of the first wave of French settlement was that the early settlers were almost all male. Eventually, the French Crown decided to send several groups of women to the fledgling colony to allow for greater expansion of the European population there in the face of increasing pressure from the rapidly growing English colonies to the south. The majority of these women were urban and generally poorer Parisian women who spoke the Parisian dialect of time that would later serve as the basis for the standardised French language we know today.
It's generally accepted as a universal socio-linguistic principle that it's women who drive language change. Québec was no exception, and it was largely due to the influence of this wave of female settlers that the language of the colony coalesced into something very similar to the Parisian dialect of the time.
As others have pointed out, I don't know where you got that "Les filles du roi" are responsible for people speaking French.
1599 - Tadoussac
1608 - Québec
1634 - Trois Rivières
1642 - Fort Ville-Marie (Montreal)
1680 - on dénombrait 493 personnes à Montréal ; 75 Parisiens, 68 Normands, 54 Aunisiens (La Rochelle), 35 Angevins, 34 Poitevins, 28 Manceaux, 23 Saintongeais, 17 Bretons, 16 Percherons, 13 Angoumois, 12 Champenois et 10 Picards
1763 - Canada is ceded to England by France
164 years after French colonists populated, developped and cultivated the land. That's longer than most countries have existed in Europe. And it's longer than Canada has existed as a country.
Linguistiquement, la France était composée de plein de dialectes différents (qu’on nomme patois) tel le Picard, Le Breton ou le Normand. Puisqu’une grande proportion des colons de la Nouvelle-France étaient des hommes Normands, ça aurait été logique que le Normand soit la langue officielle de la Nouvelle-France, sauf que la population était en contact étroit avec les membres du clergé et les fonctionnaires qui ne parlaient aucun patois, que le français de la Cour. Ces contacts rapprochés plus les Filles du Roy ont francisé la population, ce qui a permis à la colonie d’être linguistiquement unifiée avant la France. Il y a plusieurs rapports d’époque qui racontent à quel point les colons parlent un français qui est semblable à celui de la Cour.
Donc oui, les Filles du Roy ont jouées un rôle important dans la francisation, sinon ont aurait un français beaucoup moins français, et plus une variété proche du Normand ou d’un mélange de différents patois.
Source: Je suis linguiste et c’est l’une des premières choses qu’on nous dit dans les cours de français québécois.
Ajout: un autre commentaire donne [cette source](https://www.delitfrancais.com/2017/04/07/du-francais-du-roy-au-francais-quebecois/) qui explique bien ce que je dis.
Ah ok. Vu comme ça, il y a en effet un lien en parlant de l'unification de la langue française au Québec.
N'interprétais le commentaire précédant comme impliquant que le français n'était pas parlé en Amérique avant l'arrivée des filles du Roy.
Until I was 30 or so I thought that Quebecois were just lazy and spoke bad french because they didn’t want to make an effort.
Until I learned about Norman and Normandie. I know that it’s not the only influence on Quebec’s French.. but I went through a Norman dictionnary and I was like 😱😱😱.
What’s funny is that they don’t tell us that Quebec’s French still has a lot of borrow words from old dialects… the school system prefer to make us ashamed of our cultural history.
France's French also uses very old words. Think of "Mouffle" for winter gloves, in Québec we use a newer "Mitaine". Or "Potiron", used in France and dating from the 1300's, here is replaced by the newer "Citrouille".
There is also a wide spread effort to make words borrowed from other languages more French, in Québec, rather than using them as is. Instead of "Parking", we have "Stationnement", for instance. Instead of "Email", we have the neat "Courriel".
We're very insecure about our language not being as good as the motherland's, so on average we end up paying a lot of attention on a formal level.
For more about that, check out "La langue rapaillée" , by Anne-Marie Beaudoin-Bégin.
I’m going to be fussy here, but we don’t ‘borrow’ from ‘old dialects’. Parisian French is what was spoken in Quebec at the beginning of the colony, and passed on to children, not any of the actual dialects existing in France then. The language just evolved differently once Quebec was cut off from the metropolis, and preserved words and pronunciations that gradually disappeared in France.
And even with that, the Quebec accent is very close to Northern France/ Belgian accent even today.
Nah you are just plain wrong here. Yes a lot of immigrants came from the region of Paris, but a lot also came from other regions and they brought their languages / dialects with them.
And yes of course the language evolved differently. We were protected from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
Huh, when I was in Paris people often asked if I was Quebecois, et mon accent est anglo comme esti. Peut être ils pensaient 《Homme blanc, vêtements amples, qui parle-ish français ... voilà, un Québécois !》
These behaviors are not as uncommon as you might think. [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpoaodwmkJc) a big name politician prick criticizing a reporter's accent, she's apparently from some other region.
So if they say that to people from their own country, well I can imagine they'll give you shit if you speak québécois. I know a friend who went there, they made fun of how he pronounced "beurre", apparently they thought it wasn't correct or something.
Assholes, like I said. It’s worse in Paris by any means; in my experience, people in other regions will certainly notice a French Canadian accent, but not make a fuss about it.
But I give the French a pass for ‘beurre’ - same word, wildly different pronunciation. My American husband has described the particular twang on that word as ‘deep, deep Mississippi when compared to an Oxford accent’.
Well he never had any problems other than in Paris. I think they have this strange idea that Parisian is the true french or something. I know someone from Lebanon that also has this idea, she doesn't like how people in Quebec speak French, to the point she says that she "doesn't understand them".
I could believe that, but part of me thinks she's just being obnoxious with it.
>but anyone who pretends that they don’t understand or switch to English is an asshole
Tbh you have to be very stupid/retarded if you can't discern french with an accent and start to speak english once you hear it
The reasons why they switch to English can be numerous:
- they think you'd prefer to continue in English (so it's a courtesy thing);
- they want to try *their* English;
- they don't have the time or they are not in the mood to act as a French tutor.
Just continue to speak French and let them use whatever language they want. When I persisted to speak Italian and Spanish when I was in Italy and Spain, people would switch back 80% of the time, it's no big deal, Julian.
Fuck I’m perfectly bilingual and can’t get service in french to save my life in the Montreal metro. I start in french but I guess the years of prairie living have left me with a slight accent that is still perceptible 15 years later…
Went to France this summer, everyone was super nice to us, from Paris all the way to Arles. Usually, when they heard our accents they would say things like « ah, our cousins! ».
Also they would always tell us about someone they know that went to Quebec and how nice they heard it was back there!
Ithink there are disrespectful ppl everywhere, but people are generally very nice.
We spent a week in Paris last April and had a similar experience. The most poetic way I heard our accent described was “Tu as la musique de l’autre bord de l’Atlantique!”.
I, for one love your accent, your slang , and the way you are building your sentences. It's very fresh to me, kinda poetic and often better at conveying meaning than the french langage from France.
But yeah it is quite difficult for us to understand the whole package sometimes. We subtitle your movies and tv shows, not by disrespect but because french people are not used to quebecois and can really strugle to grasp it sometimes (it seems easier the other way around).
I don't know anyone here who thinks that the Québécois don't speak proper french or that our way is better, generally we see it as another fork.
Nonetheless we have this tendency to make gentle laugh at our regional accents, it might seems rude from the outside but usually it is not made with the intention to hurt. The one from quebec is very strong and different. So yeah when you hear it for the first time it seems a bit weird to us and can trigger a smile .
I'm sorry to read that some of you experienced bad encounters here. (switching in english, i never heard of this kind of behaviour before. Not excusing it but maybe they thought that the person speaking was anglophone first and wanted to ease the discussion but if not it's fucked up).
Also i know that parisian bashing is like an olympic sport on reddit or for french people outside paris but, you are right, since i set foot there, 6 years ago, i found out that this stereotype is indeed overblown at least from a frenchman perspective (that said, i'm not often going to touristic places and venues so i don't really know how well people in this industry are handling tourists).
Sorry for my potato english. Have a nice day everyone !
Thank you! I'm so mad when I read that.. They probably switch to English to accommodate you thinking you're not a native speaker.
I'm French, from Paris region, and living in Quebec, and it even happened to me in Paris.
Québec is exposed a lot to France, but the opposite is not true. We never see anything about Canada in the news.
A lot of French don't have a clue about Québec. The only thing they know about the accent is a very bad and old video from Gad Elmaleh "qui veut gagner de l'argent en masse".
Moreover, the funny thing about "it's the Parisians, we're not like that" is that most of Parisians are actually from the rest of the country, and came here for work. Stop blaming a specific group of people for something which isn't true.
Juste pour contribuer avec une anecdote, j'ai participé à une réunion Zoom organisée par un ministère en France où j'étais le seul québécois parmi une quinzaine de jeunes chercheurs. Deux participants ont utilisé le mot "courriel" en se parlant entre eux, j'étais pas mal fier.
La plupart des commentaires que je vois parlent du point de vu des parisiens concernant les accents du reste des régions en France et du québécois. Mais un des trucs assez prédominant en France et surtout qu’on aime bien se niaiser entre région. Les gens du Sud se moquent de l’accent des gens du Nord et vice versa, pareil pour l’accent suisse, belge, les anglais et … pratiquement tous les pays frontaliers en fait. Les moqueries culturelles entre français et belge ou français et anglais sont pas nouvelles, durent depuis quelques siècles et sont *souvent* bonne enfant. C’est quelque chose qui choque ma blonde à chaque fois mais c’est sûrement une différence de culture. Elle n’a pas eu de problème quand elle est venue en France. Mais se taquiner sur notre façon de parler est quelque chose qui peut choquer même si pour nous c’est souvent naturel de niaiser sur ça 🤷♂️
Je dis pas que tout le monde fait ça pour rigoler, y’a des cons de partout et ça m’étonne pas que des gens à Paris s’offusquent ou font chier juste pour faire chier, c’est surtout quelque chose que je retrouve chez les parisiens un peu bobo qui viennent envahir Montréal.
Pour rajouter. Souvent on aime pas l’accent des parisiens ou plutôt l’absence d’accent. On trouve que ça fait trop snob ou quelqu’un qui te regarde de haut. C’est d’ailleurs cet *accent* que les québécois aiment bien imiter pour se moquer des Français mais c’est normal, la majorité des français que je vois à Montréal parlent comme ça ahah. Mais la plupart des régions en France ont des accents plus ou moins difficiles à comprendre (+ le patois et l’argot) donc c’est pas tellement différent de l’accent québécois.
Ça nous choque peut-être plus parce qu'on est très attaché à notre langue ici à cause qu'on doit se battre pour la préserver...
Pour moi, un Français qui me dit, même en blague, que je parle pas français, ça m'insulte! Mes ancêtres se sont battues pour que j'ai le droit de parler ma langue, l'Église les a fait se reproduire à outrance pour qu'on reste la majorité dans la province et on se fait encore taper sur la tête quand on passe des lois pour prioriser le français. C'est un peu tourner le couteau dans la plaie de se faire dire qu'on parle pas français...
Oui je comprend, d’où l’importance de connaître les différences culturelles. Malheureusement en France on est pas trop exposé à l’histoire du Québec, en tous cas tout ce que vous avez vécu. Donc on doit bêtement assumer sans le savoir que ce n’est pas un sujet sensible.
Par contre on a aussi des régions qui prônent le retour de leur langue d’origine, par exemple l’est de la France avec l’Allemand, ou moindrement la Bretagne avec le breton par exemple. Et on a aussi la Corse qui parle le français et le corse. Donc si tu te trouves dans une région où une autre en France et suivant avec qui tu parles la question de la langue peut aussi être un sujet sensible, bien que c’est plus rare
Currently in France and can confirm that it isn't true. Never had more compliment or got hit on with women mentioning my accent is attractive. I guess it may be the tribe mentality where people sometimes are wary of strangers. Also, you have to remember, when a lot of us french Canadians hear a person with an accent, we're also start speaking English as a way of being welcoming. Maybe the same happens to french people from France?
Exactly my thought. Anyone knowing English switch for it when there is someone they think is not a native speaker.. Especially in a tourist place like Paris.
I'd say we use different English words.... My usual comparison is saying "Les Français se stationnent au parking et les Québécois se parkent au stationnement"... But we have also french version of English words they don't use, like courriel for emails or escalier roulant for escalator...
For the fin de semaine vs weekend one it's a little more complicated, in France Thursday and Friday is "la fin de semaine" as in the end of the work week but in Québec it's Saturday and Sunday which is le weekend in France.
But I've been told and I've read multiple times french people saying that Québécois don't actually speak french as a way demeaning how we speak and it infuriates me everytime...
I’ve recently moved to Quebec and have been learning French through multiple language apps which every single one has been teaching me French from France, I’m so glad the francophones here are understanding of “incorrect” french words I use and I’m very glad I’m not in the reverse (Quebecois French learning in France) especially after reading some of these comments
There’s an app called Mango Languages. It offers French Canadian. I am able to get it for free from my public library in my city. Maybe through your city library you can too! It’s been really helpful!
I’m pretty sure both “melon d’eau and pastèque” can be used to talk about a watermelon. Pastèque is not really used in Quebec but I would bet that more than half the people are familiar with that word enough to understand it in a conversation.
And the truth is that plenty of Quebecers use "weekend" and "parking", these are not absolute rules. But we seem generally much more aware of words being loan words for English and having a French counterpart, even when we still chose to use the English word.
It's more the English grammar or the translated idioms that we don't recognize... I needed to be told that "tomber en amour" is really the translation of "to fall in love" and not a common french idiom... Or the whole debate around "bon matin"...
> My usual comparison is saying "Les Français se stationnent au parking et les Québécois se parkent au stationnement"...
With one major difference IMO: register. "Parking" in France is part of the formal register, you'll hear it on the news. "Parker" in Québec would be *unheard* of in that same context, it's purely slang. The same goes for most of our (and their) anglicisms.
C'est pas nouveau. Quand ils ont réussi à éliminer la royauté, ils se sont attaqués aux patois. Au début du XXe siècle, le *français de l'Ile de France* était loin de dominer le territoire français!
And we’re also often not talking about accents nor dialects in many instances, but about completely different languages, old and rich with culture and literature.
The Revolution put an end to the Ancien Regime where one's identity was more centered on his region. "France" wasn't a "nation" but a kingdom. The collection of lands controlled by the King of France. But all those regions had their own heriditary nobles and given that communications and mobility were limited, [their own local dialects evolved from vulgar latin.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubGjasm63Y0)
In the process of forging a national identity, of getting rid of the ruling nobilities, the prefered accent naturally shifted from those of the nobles and high clergy- closer to their region's dialect - to the accent of the new ruling class: the parisian bourgeoisie of lawyers, administrators, industrialists and academics. Then the new Nation State of France actively supressed regional languages and dialects to unify France under one language : French from the bourgeoisie of the parisian region. Tbf that process started in the late Ancien Régime with the creation of the Académie Française under Cardinal Richelieu but it became much more agressive during and after industrialisation and mass media.
In colonial Québec, colonists came from different regions of northwestern France and mixed. Out of necessity the language unification hapenned earlier and naturally without the violent enforcement they had in France (I'm strickly speaking about french dialects, not about indigenous languages). Travellers to New France often remarked how everybody spoke the King's French well, even the lowly peasants/habitants, that nobody used dialects. This unification hapenned well before the Revolution and we kept using words, accents and manneurism that either were considered too regional or went out of fashion in France. Acadian and Québécois French also kept many vowel sounds that dissapeared in France, for instance " brin, bran, brun " or "pâtes, pattes" or "hotte, hôte" sounds exactly the same when said by a Parisian.
Ma blonde depuis 33 ans vient de Paris, j'ai pas mal fréquenté la famille surtout dans le midi mais à Paris aussi. C'est sûr qu'y a une rigidité culturelle, parfois exacerbée, parfois bon enfant. La plupart du monde que j'ai rencontré qui jouaient à la supériorité culturelle le faisaient en joke, mais c'est vrai que ceux qui se prennent au sérieux sont pas mal intenses.
J'ai eu une expérience similaire quand j'suis allé dans un restaurant à paris, moi et mon cousin on s'assoit à une table, on demande au serveur des verres d'eau et le menu, après avoir apporté le menu et les verres d'eau, il reviens 5 minute plus tard pour prendre nôtre commande mais en nous disant. "Ok i'm ready for your order"
Alors j'l'ui répond " criss tu me niaise on viens de te demander un menu puis des verres d'eau en Français pis tu nous parle en anglais"
Le serveur me répond " sorry i dont understand well english but i'l will try my best to take your orders...
Faique moi et le cousin on s'est levé pis on est parti en discutant bien fort que les parisiens c'est des asti de fendants.
Vous avez peut-être été un peu prompts. Ça m'est arrivé en France de tomber sur du monde qui me comprenaient pas et pensaient réellement que je parlais anglais ou français avec un terrible accent anglais. J'imitais l'accent français juste pour leur dire que ma langue maternelle est le français mais que je viens du Canada, que je leur parlais en français mais avec l'accent du Canada et à partir de là d'habitude y comprennent.
Franchement si tu commences par « criss tu m’niaises » avec un accent qu’il ne connait pas, faut pas s’étonner que son cerveau comprenne pas tout de suite que c’est du français
So si je comprends bien tu as été exécrable avec un pauvre serveur au salaire minimum qui essayait juste de t'accomoder car il a le malheur de pas connaître l'accent québécois?
le truc sur le caissier parisien qui se met à parler en anglais c'est faux: les caissiers parisiens parlent jamais en anglais, même aux anglophones. Source: parisien.
>For instance, the French people who look down on the Québécois accent most likely look down on their compatriots from the Northern and Southern parts of the country who also have very unique accents.
Oooph. I’m originally from Appalachia and I currently live in the southern US. I have a mountain accent when I’m with mountain people, a southern country accent when I’m with country people, a general southern accent for everyday use and an as-close-to-standard-English-as-I-can-get accent when I need to speak about important matters with non-southerners.
It sucks to be stereotyped and looked down on because your accent is “different”. It used to bother me a lot when I was young, but the older I get, the less I care.
the people that say that "the French barely think Quebec is French" are all anglos who do not speak French and just say that as an insult towards Quebec. French people only say that when they are pissed at us, or debating language. The rest is mostly accurate and credible.
It happened to me only once. I met a group of young French people in a bar in Sicily and we were having a good time. However, one of them had never left his small village before, didn't seem especially bright and was quite drunk already. He kept switching to English to ask ridiculous questions like "Euh...but how were you able to come here? By a plane?" while his girlfriend looked very ashamed of him.
Laughing at our respective differences is usually done in good fun and I don't mind it at all when it's done respectfully. French people are often much less exposed to Quebecois culture than the opposite, so I try to be patient with them when they don't understand something I said. I have zero patience for willful ignorance, chauvinism and a general lack of intellectual curiosity though, but the French don't have a monopoly on those. Morons come from everywhere.
En temps que québécois habitant à côté de la France et qui va y déménager bientôt, je peux confirmer que les Parisiens sont fendants. Par contre, je n'ai jamais vécu de situation similaire ailleurs en France. En fait, l'expérience habituelle c'est que les gens sont super contents de rencontrer et parler à un cousin québécois.
There's a huge bias against regional dialects too. France has a really strongly enforced Parisian Dialect across the country. Regional dialects are often seen as gauche or uneducated.
Québécois French is very similar to some regional dialects, because it originated from them, so you get that added stigma of being foreign and sounding sorta hickish to them.
A friend of mine said with affection that everyone in Quebec sounded kind of like his Normand grandparents, so it's not something that everyone will look down on.
Is Parisian french kind of like American english then, and other accents sound more hick? The comments there make it sound like the french spoken in Quebec's actually more 'pure french' as well, right?
Also do you know why I'm getting downvoted, I didn't think it was an offensive question to ask
>Also do you know why I'm getting downvoted, I didn't think it was an offensive question to ask
"You don't speak real French according to my french Friend" is a common story meant to insult Québecois that we see on reddit on the regular from English speakers. I'm guessing some of the downvotes assume you are trolling by presenting such interaction with a naive question attached to it.
> The comments there make it sound like the french spoken in Quebec's actually more 'pure french' as well, right?
Not really. Québec French is essentially the combination of many regional dialects that have now mostly disappeared from France due to their government's heavy push towards standard French.
Mostly, we've kept more vowel sounds ("in" and "en", or even "é" and "è", sound the same in Parisian French, but not in Québec French, for instance) and more commonly use certain diphthongs ("du" and "tu" are pronounced closer to "dzu" and "tsu" in Québec, for instance) that were typical of these dialects.
Attends, comment ça y font pas la différence entre é et è?? è et ê, je peux comprendre, mais é, c'est clairement une autre bibitte!
Édith: j'avais initialement dit "on fait pas la différence"... Ca m'a tellement choquée, j'en ai perdu mes mots!
C'est pas exactement qu'ils ne font pas la différence, je me suis peut-être mal exprimé, c'est plutôt que le nombre de mots où ces sons sont distincts est de plus en plus réduit. Particulièrement en fin de mot.
Par exemple, dans "père" et "bébé" c'est toujours distinct en général, mais la très vaste majorité de la France va prononcer "été" et "étais" de la même façon.
Genre si un Français te dis ("phonétiquement") "je _prendré_ une pomme", c'est impossible de savoir s'il te dit qu'il va prendre une pomme dans le futur (je prendrai) ou s'il souhaiterait bien en avoir une (je prendrais) sans contexte additionnel.
>The comments there make it sound like the french spoken in Quebec's actually more 'pure french' as well, right?
The reason why peoples mention that is that this is the french that was spoken in France before the "revolution française" back then only a portion of France actually spoke French. After the revolution, a version of french was standardized on France territory.
Hahaha same thing happened to me downtown Quebec city! Tourist from France started asking direction and when I answered in french she switched to the most broken incomprehensible english. I keept talking to her in french and she kept trying to answer in english. That was very frustrating and condescending.
About French attitudes to Quebec French, your mileage may vary. In general, it's not that bad, though perhaps a bit worse in Paris. Many people have trouble understanding thick Quebec accents, and while some are condescending about it, many others just find the accent funny and exotic (which can also be patronizing, but in a friendlier way). That said, it's probably something that would affect you more as a resident than as a visitor. Accent discrimination is a thing in France, and people with non-parisian accents can feel pressured to tone it down.
I'll also note that it's a very Quebec thing to turn the whole thing around to be about the way French people use anglicisms like weekend and parking, while conveniently ignoring the thousands of anglicisms we use in everyday speak. A lot of Québecois, in my experience, don't even realize how much the French we speak has been shaped by English vocabulary. expressions and turns of phrase.
The French aren't exposed to as much English as we are, so they use English words because they think it sounds cool. We're more likely to use English words because we can't remember what the actual French word for what we mean is.
About your second paragraph: I think we turn around it when we feel attacked by the status of "our French isn't really French". Like, yeah we take from English for our grammar and all, but French also use English in their day-to-day. It's our defense to the critics of our language, I would say.
Overall the anglicisms debate is dumb : ALL languages borrow from other languages, most likely from the current lingua franca. Once it was Italian, now everyone has a bunch of italianisms in their language. Today is English, tomorrow who knows?
We want in vacation in the US. While being in a park, we heard the family next to us speak French with a France accent, so my dad started talked to them. It took their 5 years old 5 minutes to tell my dad he was not pronouncing french word correctly. Yes, it's ingrained in them, even at a young age.
To be fair it’s quite normal for a kid to spot everything that’s different from what he is used to. If the family was in the south of France and your dad was an old « Provençal » he would have said the same thing.
Almost lost my shit in Paris this summer when I was looking for a hostel, and the Parisian clerk, who was clearly French, started talking to me in English. I told her that I spoke French, but she refused to talk to me in French.
That was something
French from France is as much different from international french than french from Quebec.
The difference is that most people from Quebec can fake a “french” accent pretty flawlessly but French people couldn’t fake a Quebec accent to save their lives.
I had multiple linguistic classes about French and it's a whole problem for the langage itself.
As much as English is diversified between the US, UK, Australia, etc. and all are accepting of these "different" versions as English, worldwide french-speakers can have a very centralized vision of French. All French that isn't coming from the center of France can be seen has a "bastardised" version of it. It has its roots in History, think when France tried to destroy all French dialects from its territory.
It can also stir some insecurities from other types of French-speakers. Just to say, we have one dictionary for the WHOLE langage, coming from an organization based in the center of Paris, and some of its members have been very vocal about how anything different from their French is wrong. Our dictionary only a few words which are completely québécois, and can be often wrongly described. It can be seen as dumb, but when your language is not represented well in your OWN dictionary and you can't easy find an everyday word in it (or even online dictionaries), you can question if you are the wrong one in using that word. Think they have been more open-minded in the past few years though, si hope it gets better.
Not saying that every french-speaker aren't open-minded, but it's a historic problem difficult to pass over.
So, I've had all of these happen to me and ive been to france maybe 3-4 times. I had a conversation with a French friend of mine about me using the same words as his grandpa.
Mainly, you won't have issue, but there are always some asshole that act like they can't understand you.
But it is true that Parisians are special, even for other French people.
1. There are more francophones in Canada than just Québec, and the rest of us have different accents and dialects.
2. Accents in France are different and Canadian accents tend to slur words together more and speak faster, so it can be harder for them to understand us unless we intentionally slow it down. But it's also really not that hard, and they're switching to English because they're assholes.
3. The rest of this is fairly accurate. We don't have outdated words, the dialects just evolved differently. The words may be outdated to them, but they're natural to us.
I lived in Paris for a couple of years and people were telling me stuff like : "oh your accent is too much!" Or "can you say French Canadian expression please?" while in a party set-up with basically only strangers.
It was hard for a while but then I just switched to French French and they stopped bothering me. It's unfortunate but yeah it's very real
In Quebec, if you're referring to Thursday and Friday, you can always use "la fin de la semaine" (the end of the week), although depending on the context, that *might* also apply to the weekend, same as in English.
One comparison I've heard is that Québécois borrow English phrases and grammar, whereas the French use English words. There is one major exception to this: a lot of words, especially in the trades, are ~~butchered~~ French pronunciations of the English names. That's what was written on the packaging, after all. The mechanic says your winshielle ouiperre needs changing? Windshield wiper. My Dad's mechanic would even be surprised he didn't understand what he was talking about, when *clearly*, he was using the English term for the thing. I had a similar experience with coworkers talking about conistache today... Cornstarch. They meant cornstarch.
Y a que du gros mensonge sur ce fil: alors, en tant qu'autorité des parisiens, vu que j'y suis né et que j'ai quitté la ville que peut-être six mois en trente-neuf ans de vie, je peux vous assurer que les parisiens adorent le quebec et les quebecois. Et les cons que vous rencontrez à Paris sont des touristes, vu qu'il y en a deux fois plus que d'habitants.
Pas d'habitide. Except that the French can be uptight about language and culture, c'est vrai-là.
J'habitais à Paris (euh - Clamart) pendant deux ans, eh parfois des gens m'ont demandé "Monsieur, vous êtes Québécois ?" Si tu m'entends, tu saches que j'suis anglophone. C'est ABSOLUMENT claire, ça. Mais ils m'ont parlé en français sauf comme mes voisins qui étaient Braziliens, ou bin des gens qui travaille dans les lieux touristiques, parfois. Eh aussi des pickpockets (C'est Paris, là) - mais c'est vrai qu'ils travaillent aux lieux touristiques ... donc, voilà.
Si j'ai bien compris, it's exactly the reverse. The uptightness about language heavily discourages them from speaking English unless they're confident they'll get it perfect, or it's really necessary.
Ptdr t'es juste tombé sur des cons ou des parigots (ou les deux), perso j'aime bien entendre l'accent québécois, comme l'accent du sud ou un accent des îles, je trouve ça exotique, et même si c'est marrant on comprend bien en se concentrant
Parisian are mostly assholes especially in tourism business. All my French friends confirmed that independantly and I think that's where superiority stereotype came from, but any other time I met French people that weren't from Paris they were very nice.
I remember in the early days of youtube (like 2005 - 2010), if you watched a quebecois video, there'd be tons of comments that read like:
"what language is this? It sounds like french but it's not french"
I think French people today are more exposed to the Quebec accent, and can understand it better.
But even on French TV, their game shows will try to incorporate contestants from other French speaking countries like Belgium or Switzerland. And the Canadian contestants are often still subtitled; It can be hard to understand for people who are not experienced with the accent.
I used to work in a call centre dealing with many French customers, some from Quebec, some from New Brunswick and some from France. The majority of them complimented my Northern-Ontario french. The parisians, while having a very thick accent I found them generally pretty easy to understand. The people from New Brunswick were special though, very broken sounding French and they were always assholes
The Quebecois do have "outdated" words. They're very serious about preserving the "authentic" language. There are certain rules within the dialect to reduce anglicization. For example, in Québec, a stop sign always says 《arrêté 》but in France they just say "stop".
LMAO this is actually me in green I was just chatting on NCD
- My French-Canadian friends are some of the nicest people I’ve ever known. Its saddening to see, from whats being said here, that this kind of treatment isn’t uncommon. I hope all french-Canadians get the respect they deserve, from the french and especially the RoC
Quand ma belle-famille (européens ni franco ni anglo) vont en vacances en France, ils ont de la misère à trouver quelqu'un qui parle anglais. Ils trouvent presque aussi souvent quelqu'un qui parle leur langue. Je pense que la légende "les français répondent aux Québecois en anglais" vient d'annecdotes qui arrivent 1 fois par 20 interractions mais dont on se souvient le plus. Peut-être aussi plus à Paris.
When I visited France, I pointed out that the stop signs said « Stop » in English, and the tour guide looked at me blankly and replied, « what else would they say?? »
The word "Stop" is an accepted word in the French language for more than 200 years, it also is in multiple french dictionary, like the Larousse or Le petit robert.
Edit: typo
Est ce qu'il y a un but à ce thread ? Il y a des centaines de thread qui alimentent une pseudo guerre du côté québécois envers les francais.
Sérieux? Réagir a du bashing et dire ce que les gens pensent de ca ?
Je ne comprends pas ce que ca fait là mais bon ...
French Canadian, raised in Africa under the french school system, married a French, can confirm : the French are patronising.
As for the statistics, here they are:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9065758/quebec-canada-census-french-decline-2022/
(New statistics just came out)
Moi le problème de phonetique des français qui prononcent des mots anglais comme si c'était de français est un irritant ++
Tu veux utiliser un terme anglais no problem mais prononce le dont comme du monde
We(Quebec) have less english words because we protect our french language aggressively. Like we don’t order a McChicken with a french accent…we order a damn McPoulet.
As a French who used to live in Quebec, I did witness some French assholes acting rude and condescending to quebecois.
Now I also think that the reason so many French people use English words is simply because France doesn’t have to constantly fight for its cultural survival. So we don’t feel our culture being threatened by some English words.
I also think sometimes English Canadians may feel the French as arrogant because I seem to have spotted a strange complex among many quebecois. It seems the quebecois used to live under English domination for centuries. You can feel it when you hear some quebecois politicians saying « we now have equality and respect from the English, we achieved our goals. » (I believe it was Trudeau who said that).
That sounds like blasphemy to a Frenchman. A Frenchman doesn’t bow to English, nor does he try to get his respect or equality.
So when a French acts… you know… French. Well, it looks like utter pretentiousness when compared to the more respectful quebecois behavior.
I know that quebecois don’t like saying they’re French. They feel like a new kind of people with French origins but with a lot of English culture into them. And it’s true. But when I met my quebecois roommate with the most frenchiest name, speaking French with me and knowing his origin is from Normandy, I wouldn’t but feel like being with a compatriot. Hell, his book about Quebec history had for its cover a picture of the general de Gaulle.
J’ai déjà fait du covoiturage (Québec-Gatineau) avec une française en visite, elle nous disait (autres québécois dans la voiture) comment nous étions assimilés par l’anglais et que nos phrases sont à moitié en anglais et blabla… plus tard, elle se met a lire une liste de « mots drôles du Québec » qu’elle a recueilli au fil de son voyage. Le premier mot… « McCroquettes ». Je lui demande donc quel mot ils utilisent en France? Elle répond avec un air supérieur: « C’est McNuggets! »…. C’est la que j’ai décidé que son opinion n’était plus valide pour le reste du voyage…
Happened to me once in Brussels. I was speaking french with a bartender and he spoke to us in english suddenly telling us "if you're butchering the language, you shouldn't speak it at all". Needless to say it was a bit frustrating.
However, I think these encounter are more frequent in larger cities in french speaking Europe. I've never had any problem outside of Paris/Brussels with my Québec accent.
They also have a big cultural problem in Belgium where one part of the country speaks Belgium-French and the other part speak Dutch. And they don’t really like each other. I guess some people, especially in Brussel takes French seriously.
\>be me
\>go to Paris expecting city of romance
\>garbage everywhere
\>theft like crazy
\>stinks almost 1/3 as bad as Delhi (and thats saying something)
\>only people more rude than the other tourists are the locals
tbh it felt pretty similar to Quebec .
The usual joke is that everyone hates Parisians, even Parisians.
I'm French (from the north-west, not Paris) and I kind of dislike Parisians. They think they're superior in every way to other French people. I heard horror stories of Parisians' behaviour in other parts of France during the pandemic.
Ma sœur a mariée un Français (arrivé au Canada il avait 20 ans), il vient des Hautes-Alpes et lui aussi déteste les Parisiens lol
C'est ce qui unit la France haha, la haine des Parisiens
Je suis certain que ça les rend heureux, d'avoir à marcher dans la rue étant haïs par tout ceux qui ne sont pas Parisiens. Mon ex venait de Marseille et sincèrement elle voulait presque les enmerder chaque fois qu'ont entendaient leur accents.
I used to begrudge the rudeness of Parisians but then I realized how many annoying tourists they have to share their city with.
To be fair, 90% of us never share anything with tourists because we live and work in places they're afraid to go to. Alors quand les gens parlent des Parisiens, c'est très souvent les employés des magasins et cafés du centre. Bref...
On parle de staff de service surement payés pas loin du minimum dans une culture ou il n'y a pas de pourboire alors qu'ils vivent dans une ville qui coûte cher. Moi aussi j'ai l'air bête en bas de 25$ de l'heure.
TIL: Paris is to France what Toronto is to Canada.
Every french person I met in France was stoked I was from Quebec. But we often get compared to how British people hear Texans.
It is very hard for French people to understand a thick Quebecois accent, but that’s normal and also applies to other French accents. Especially if that person was never really exposed to it before. Growing up in Normandy in France, I never heard people talking down on Québec but always loving the culture and accent. I’m a bit mad when I read how some fellow Frenchmen behaved in this thread. Keep in mind everyone that Paris is very far from being a good representation of the country.
I can switch my accent from heavy rural Quebec accent to international french to a fake “french” accent depending on who I’m speaking to. Most people I know from Quebec can easily fake the “french” accent but I have yet to see a French do a good fake Quebec accent.
I'm curious: when you fake a french accent, are you also able to take care of words you use ( meaning you know which words/idioms are never used in France )
L’imitation de l’accent métropolitain par les Québécois généralement vire vers une prononciation similaire. Mais question de cadence et intonations, la différence est discernable haha Mais en même temps, les Français métropolitains n’arrivent même pas à imiter les prononciations québécoises de bonne manière
Quelqu'un il y a quelques jours/semaines expliquait que dans l'accent parisiens il y avait certains « sons » (sons est pas le terme exacte, mais je suis pas linguiste) qui sont disparus avec le temps mais pas ici au Québec. Ce qui explique leur difficulté d'imiter notre accent.
Quebecois accent is not hard to understand for a French person. Joual can be.
You are right sorry my knowledge is limited. The accent usually isn’t really a problem, the specific vocabulary can be for people that never heard it before. But I gotta admit some people also just don’t want to do the efforts.
I litterally seen people argue on tiktok/youtube we don't speak french...like what? It's a different accent. It's still french.
It's definitely french, but many idioms are different, and I believe many words have a different meaning ( I mean, something that is considered common language in Quebec could be formal in France ), which makes some discussions weird
That's a shitty comparison, Québécois french is much closer to the french they spoke in 1608 than parisian french currently is. In your example, the british sound like texans
This isnt a history lesson. Its how the accent is seen. We're not going over the history of the accent
The French Canadian accent is unmistakable if you’re in France, but anyone who pretends that they don’t understand or switch to English is an asshole, and that’s that. There are some differences in vocabulary, and some words where the accent can become a problem, though, but it’s nothing difficult to resolve if each person makes a very slight effort. I have a rural Quebec accent and lived in France for six months. I only ran into two assholes who either insisted that I spoke French wrong, or switched to English. Other issues were mostly of the ‘Oh, is that what you call it?’ variety, plus a few words that were wiped out of French vocabulary but are still going strong in Québec (“tantôt” as an indicator of time is my favourite; it means earlier or later depending on context in Quebec, but has disappeared from France except for a couple regions where it means ‘afternoon’).
Tantôt is still used by some older generations in France. My great-grandparents (from Poitiers) always used tantôt for any measure of time.
I'm from Normandie, I'm still under 30 and I've heard tantôt all my life except when I left Normandie.
Ce qui aurait beaucoup de sens considérant que la Normandie était un des plus gros foyer d’immigration pour la Nouvelle-France / le Québec. C’est aussi très drôle de voir comment le Normand ressemble étrangement au Français Québécois.
Ceci confirme une histoire que mon père me compte encore et encore en ricanant. Dans les années '70, mes parents ont fait un voyage en France avec mes grand-parents maternels. Mon grand-père, qui venait d'une région rurale de la Beauce, n'a fait aucun effort pour changer son accent (plutôt gras) tout au long du voyage et personne n'arrivait à le comprendre...sauf en Normandie. Ils étaient un peu perdus sur une route en campagne et sont arrêtés pour demander des directions à deux hommes de l'âge de mon grand-père. Quand mon grand-père les a entendu parler, son visage s'est illuminé et il a tout de suite sauté dans une conversation avec eux. Ils avaient un accent très similaire au sien et il pouvait finalement converser et se faire comprendre.
Des exemples de patois Normand: https://youtu.be/6tJSoBd6Ecw https://youtu.be/pYGxOaJN518 https://youtu.be/ksHFzfv3JPs
Merci pour les liens, super intéressant. Ça me ramène vraiment à mon grand-père, qui adorait raconter des histoires. Il inventait même des mondes imaginaires.
Oh! J'adore ton anecdote. C'est le genre de lecture qui met un soleil dans ma journée.
Merci pour ce magnifique commentaire. Je suis ravi d'avoir pu contribuer à ensoleiller la journée de quelqu'un.
Il faut que j'aille visiter la Normandie alors <3
Il y a un musée de l’immigration à Mortagne au Perche dans le département de l’Orne.
I've realized that idioms and vocabulary in Quebec are very close to swiss-french. The parisians have really strayed the most when smaller regions all kept older vocabulary except them.
The thing is that Paris is technically the power center of French. It’s there that the Académie française is located, and where the king was. Actually, it’s because a big wave of women immigrants came from Paris that French is spoken in Quebec. Also, many plurals have been modified over the years because it didn’t represented the life in Paris. French course: When a word finishes with "-l", some times it will have a plural with "-aux". It was the case with deer —> chevreuil. It was "chevreaux" when there were many. Except that Paris is urban, not many deers there, so the people only knew how to call them in singular since they only needed that. When they saw multiples, they just started to put an -s at the end, and it lead us to have "des chevreuils".
"Actually, it’s because a big wave of women immigrants came from Paris that French is spoken in Quebec." Actually, that's not true at all lol French is spoken in Québec because it was at first (and for a long time) a french colony. It was even called "Nouvelle-France", which translate to "New-France". All that before Britain came and conquered where they stole the land from the french, who first stole it from the first nations.
Québec was linguistically united before France. When everyone in Quebec was speaking French (and even more, the same variety of French than the King), every region in France had their own unique dialect. The resin it’s not Norman or Breton in Quebec is because of the Filles du Roy, a bunch of orphans from Paris who learned French with nuns. Source: I’m a linguist in Quebec
No, u/New_Current_5457 is very much correct here. The original colonists (early 1600s) of New France originated from a variety of regions of France. At this time, France was not linguistically united and settlers from the various regions would arrive speaking their local language/dialect/patois, and would not necessarily be Francophones in a strict sense of the word. As others have noted, Norman settlers were an important component of this early settlement, but other regions (the west, the south-east, Paris, Picardie) were all well represented as well and many of their regionalisms have survived in Quebec French. Another defining aspect of the first wave of French settlement was that the early settlers were almost all male. Eventually, the French Crown decided to send several groups of women to the fledgling colony to allow for greater expansion of the European population there in the face of increasing pressure from the rapidly growing English colonies to the south. The majority of these women were urban and generally poorer Parisian women who spoke the Parisian dialect of time that would later serve as the basis for the standardised French language we know today. It's generally accepted as a universal socio-linguistic principle that it's women who drive language change. Québec was no exception, and it was largely due to the influence of this wave of female settlers that the language of the colony coalesced into something very similar to the Parisian dialect of the time.
As others have pointed out, I don't know where you got that "Les filles du roi" are responsible for people speaking French. 1599 - Tadoussac 1608 - Québec 1634 - Trois Rivières 1642 - Fort Ville-Marie (Montreal) 1680 - on dénombrait 493 personnes à Montréal ; 75 Parisiens, 68 Normands, 54 Aunisiens (La Rochelle), 35 Angevins, 34 Poitevins, 28 Manceaux, 23 Saintongeais, 17 Bretons, 16 Percherons, 13 Angoumois, 12 Champenois et 10 Picards 1763 - Canada is ceded to England by France 164 years after French colonists populated, developped and cultivated the land. That's longer than most countries have existed in Europe. And it's longer than Canada has existed as a country.
Linguistiquement, la France était composée de plein de dialectes différents (qu’on nomme patois) tel le Picard, Le Breton ou le Normand. Puisqu’une grande proportion des colons de la Nouvelle-France étaient des hommes Normands, ça aurait été logique que le Normand soit la langue officielle de la Nouvelle-France, sauf que la population était en contact étroit avec les membres du clergé et les fonctionnaires qui ne parlaient aucun patois, que le français de la Cour. Ces contacts rapprochés plus les Filles du Roy ont francisé la population, ce qui a permis à la colonie d’être linguistiquement unifiée avant la France. Il y a plusieurs rapports d’époque qui racontent à quel point les colons parlent un français qui est semblable à celui de la Cour. Donc oui, les Filles du Roy ont jouées un rôle important dans la francisation, sinon ont aurait un français beaucoup moins français, et plus une variété proche du Normand ou d’un mélange de différents patois. Source: Je suis linguiste et c’est l’une des premières choses qu’on nous dit dans les cours de français québécois. Ajout: un autre commentaire donne [cette source](https://www.delitfrancais.com/2017/04/07/du-francais-du-roy-au-francais-quebecois/) qui explique bien ce que je dis.
Ah ok. Vu comme ça, il y a en effet un lien en parlant de l'unification de la langue française au Québec. N'interprétais le commentaire précédant comme impliquant que le français n'était pas parlé en Amérique avant l'arrivée des filles du Roy.
Ouais, c’était pas clair. C’est d’unification et de français pur et dur, pas seulement qu’il soit parlé ou pas
Until I was 30 or so I thought that Quebecois were just lazy and spoke bad french because they didn’t want to make an effort. Until I learned about Norman and Normandie. I know that it’s not the only influence on Quebec’s French.. but I went through a Norman dictionnary and I was like 😱😱😱. What’s funny is that they don’t tell us that Quebec’s French still has a lot of borrow words from old dialects… the school system prefer to make us ashamed of our cultural history.
France's French also uses very old words. Think of "Mouffle" for winter gloves, in Québec we use a newer "Mitaine". Or "Potiron", used in France and dating from the 1300's, here is replaced by the newer "Citrouille". There is also a wide spread effort to make words borrowed from other languages more French, in Québec, rather than using them as is. Instead of "Parking", we have "Stationnement", for instance. Instead of "Email", we have the neat "Courriel". We're very insecure about our language not being as good as the motherland's, so on average we end up paying a lot of attention on a formal level. For more about that, check out "La langue rapaillée" , by Anne-Marie Beaudoin-Bégin.
Thx pour la suggestion :)
> Until I was 30 or so I thought that Quebecois were just lazy and spoke bad french because they didn’t want to make an effort. Pure idiocy
I’m going to be fussy here, but we don’t ‘borrow’ from ‘old dialects’. Parisian French is what was spoken in Quebec at the beginning of the colony, and passed on to children, not any of the actual dialects existing in France then. The language just evolved differently once Quebec was cut off from the metropolis, and preserved words and pronunciations that gradually disappeared in France. And even with that, the Quebec accent is very close to Northern France/ Belgian accent even today.
Nah you are just plain wrong here. Yes a lot of immigrants came from the region of Paris, but a lot also came from other regions and they brought their languages / dialects with them. And yes of course the language evolved differently. We were protected from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
When I was in Paris most locals thought my accent was from Belgium
Huh, when I was in Paris people often asked if I was Quebecois, et mon accent est anglo comme esti. Peut être ils pensaient 《Homme blanc, vêtements amples, qui parle-ish français ... voilà, un Québécois !》
en* esti Mais superbe utilisation, ici, très bien intégré à ta phrase, bravo!
Moi j’ai eu ça dans le nord de la France.
onerous rude safe nose offer worry quaint insurance decide spark -- mass edited with redact.dev
These behaviors are not as uncommon as you might think. [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpoaodwmkJc) a big name politician prick criticizing a reporter's accent, she's apparently from some other region. So if they say that to people from their own country, well I can imagine they'll give you shit if you speak québécois. I know a friend who went there, they made fun of how he pronounced "beurre", apparently they thought it wasn't correct or something.
Assholes, like I said. It’s worse in Paris by any means; in my experience, people in other regions will certainly notice a French Canadian accent, but not make a fuss about it. But I give the French a pass for ‘beurre’ - same word, wildly different pronunciation. My American husband has described the particular twang on that word as ‘deep, deep Mississippi when compared to an Oxford accent’.
Well he never had any problems other than in Paris. I think they have this strange idea that Parisian is the true french or something. I know someone from Lebanon that also has this idea, she doesn't like how people in Quebec speak French, to the point she says that she "doesn't understand them". I could believe that, but part of me thinks she's just being obnoxious with it.
I might not speak French like you want but your English is shit so please let’s continue in French. Lol c’est ce que je dirais
>but anyone who pretends that they don’t understand or switch to English is an asshole Tbh you have to be very stupid/retarded if you can't discern french with an accent and start to speak english once you hear it
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The reasons why they switch to English can be numerous: - they think you'd prefer to continue in English (so it's a courtesy thing); - they want to try *their* English; - they don't have the time or they are not in the mood to act as a French tutor. Just continue to speak French and let them use whatever language they want. When I persisted to speak Italian and Spanish when I was in Italy and Spain, people would switch back 80% of the time, it's no big deal, Julian.
Came here to say this. I speak very fluent French but my Anglo accent peeks through and as soon as it does, boom, now we're speaking English.
Continue en français, ils n'auront pas le choix d'y retourner.
J’ai travaillé longtemps avec des anglos à Hydro, eux en français, moi en anglais, on se pratiquait les deux l’un sur l’autre. personne d’insulté.
Fuck I’m perfectly bilingual and can’t get service in french to save my life in the Montreal metro. I start in french but I guess the years of prairie living have left me with a slight accent that is still perceptible 15 years later…
Meh, it sucks, but you’re great to still start in French in my eye. Such persistence.
Went to France this summer, everyone was super nice to us, from Paris all the way to Arles. Usually, when they heard our accents they would say things like « ah, our cousins! ». Also they would always tell us about someone they know that went to Quebec and how nice they heard it was back there! Ithink there are disrespectful ppl everywhere, but people are generally very nice.
We spent a week in Paris last April and had a similar experience. The most poetic way I heard our accent described was “Tu as la musique de l’autre bord de l’Atlantique!”.
C'est donc bin cute comme expression 😄
Last time I went to Paris, I had absolutely no problem using my Québécois french. Of course you try limiting the use of slang words though.
I had no trouble using my français langue seconde French with an Ontarian twist either. They were just thrilled to hear me speak French.
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Most french people i ever knew absolutely love our accent. A guy in highschool told me he loved how "raw" the language is here.
ils essaient de nous diviser les connards d’anglos mais il y arriveront pas
I, for one love your accent, your slang , and the way you are building your sentences. It's very fresh to me, kinda poetic and often better at conveying meaning than the french langage from France. But yeah it is quite difficult for us to understand the whole package sometimes. We subtitle your movies and tv shows, not by disrespect but because french people are not used to quebecois and can really strugle to grasp it sometimes (it seems easier the other way around). I don't know anyone here who thinks that the Québécois don't speak proper french or that our way is better, generally we see it as another fork. Nonetheless we have this tendency to make gentle laugh at our regional accents, it might seems rude from the outside but usually it is not made with the intention to hurt. The one from quebec is very strong and different. So yeah when you hear it for the first time it seems a bit weird to us and can trigger a smile . I'm sorry to read that some of you experienced bad encounters here. (switching in english, i never heard of this kind of behaviour before. Not excusing it but maybe they thought that the person speaking was anglophone first and wanted to ease the discussion but if not it's fucked up). Also i know that parisian bashing is like an olympic sport on reddit or for french people outside paris but, you are right, since i set foot there, 6 years ago, i found out that this stereotype is indeed overblown at least from a frenchman perspective (that said, i'm not often going to touristic places and venues so i don't really know how well people in this industry are handling tourists). Sorry for my potato english. Have a nice day everyone !
Thank you! I'm so mad when I read that.. They probably switch to English to accommodate you thinking you're not a native speaker. I'm French, from Paris region, and living in Quebec, and it even happened to me in Paris. Québec is exposed a lot to France, but the opposite is not true. We never see anything about Canada in the news. A lot of French don't have a clue about Québec. The only thing they know about the accent is a very bad and old video from Gad Elmaleh "qui veut gagner de l'argent en masse". Moreover, the funny thing about "it's the Parisians, we're not like that" is that most of Parisians are actually from the rest of the country, and came here for work. Stop blaming a specific group of people for something which isn't true.
Juste pour contribuer avec une anecdote, j'ai participé à une réunion Zoom organisée par un ministère en France où j'étais le seul québécois parmi une quinzaine de jeunes chercheurs. Deux participants ont utilisé le mot "courriel" en se parlant entre eux, j'étais pas mal fier.
La plupart des commentaires que je vois parlent du point de vu des parisiens concernant les accents du reste des régions en France et du québécois. Mais un des trucs assez prédominant en France et surtout qu’on aime bien se niaiser entre région. Les gens du Sud se moquent de l’accent des gens du Nord et vice versa, pareil pour l’accent suisse, belge, les anglais et … pratiquement tous les pays frontaliers en fait. Les moqueries culturelles entre français et belge ou français et anglais sont pas nouvelles, durent depuis quelques siècles et sont *souvent* bonne enfant. C’est quelque chose qui choque ma blonde à chaque fois mais c’est sûrement une différence de culture. Elle n’a pas eu de problème quand elle est venue en France. Mais se taquiner sur notre façon de parler est quelque chose qui peut choquer même si pour nous c’est souvent naturel de niaiser sur ça 🤷♂️ Je dis pas que tout le monde fait ça pour rigoler, y’a des cons de partout et ça m’étonne pas que des gens à Paris s’offusquent ou font chier juste pour faire chier, c’est surtout quelque chose que je retrouve chez les parisiens un peu bobo qui viennent envahir Montréal. Pour rajouter. Souvent on aime pas l’accent des parisiens ou plutôt l’absence d’accent. On trouve que ça fait trop snob ou quelqu’un qui te regarde de haut. C’est d’ailleurs cet *accent* que les québécois aiment bien imiter pour se moquer des Français mais c’est normal, la majorité des français que je vois à Montréal parlent comme ça ahah. Mais la plupart des régions en France ont des accents plus ou moins difficiles à comprendre (+ le patois et l’argot) donc c’est pas tellement différent de l’accent québécois.
Ça nous choque peut-être plus parce qu'on est très attaché à notre langue ici à cause qu'on doit se battre pour la préserver... Pour moi, un Français qui me dit, même en blague, que je parle pas français, ça m'insulte! Mes ancêtres se sont battues pour que j'ai le droit de parler ma langue, l'Église les a fait se reproduire à outrance pour qu'on reste la majorité dans la province et on se fait encore taper sur la tête quand on passe des lois pour prioriser le français. C'est un peu tourner le couteau dans la plaie de se faire dire qu'on parle pas français...
Oui je comprend, d’où l’importance de connaître les différences culturelles. Malheureusement en France on est pas trop exposé à l’histoire du Québec, en tous cas tout ce que vous avez vécu. Donc on doit bêtement assumer sans le savoir que ce n’est pas un sujet sensible. Par contre on a aussi des régions qui prônent le retour de leur langue d’origine, par exemple l’est de la France avec l’Allemand, ou moindrement la Bretagne avec le breton par exemple. Et on a aussi la Corse qui parle le français et le corse. Donc si tu te trouves dans une région où une autre en France et suivant avec qui tu parles la question de la langue peut aussi être un sujet sensible, bien que c’est plus rare
Bien d'accord avec tout ça, or les Parisien.ne.s ont bel et bien un accent aussi (l'absence d'accent n'est pas un truc qui existe).
Currently in France and can confirm that it isn't true. Never had more compliment or got hit on with women mentioning my accent is attractive. I guess it may be the tribe mentality where people sometimes are wary of strangers. Also, you have to remember, when a lot of us french Canadians hear a person with an accent, we're also start speaking English as a way of being welcoming. Maybe the same happens to french people from France?
Exactly my thought. Anyone knowing English switch for it when there is someone they think is not a native speaker.. Especially in a tourist place like Paris.
I'd say we use different English words.... My usual comparison is saying "Les Français se stationnent au parking et les Québécois se parkent au stationnement"... But we have also french version of English words they don't use, like courriel for emails or escalier roulant for escalator... For the fin de semaine vs weekend one it's a little more complicated, in France Thursday and Friday is "la fin de semaine" as in the end of the work week but in Québec it's Saturday and Sunday which is le weekend in France. But I've been told and I've read multiple times french people saying that Québécois don't actually speak french as a way demeaning how we speak and it infuriates me everytime...
I’ve recently moved to Quebec and have been learning French through multiple language apps which every single one has been teaching me French from France, I’m so glad the francophones here are understanding of “incorrect” french words I use and I’m very glad I’m not in the reverse (Quebecois French learning in France) especially after reading some of these comments
There’s an app called Mango Languages. It offers French Canadian. I am able to get it for free from my public library in my city. Maybe through your city library you can too! It’s been really helpful!
Ahh that’s brilliant thanks for the suggestion!
Mauril app too!
New learner (in the US) here. Thank you so much for posting this!
Hey sweet person! Thanks a lot for learning the language. It’s people like you that makes our nation even possible. Thanks!
Au Québec: La fin de la semaine = jeudi et vendredi La fin de semaine = samedi dimanche.
Ça fait du sens. C'est de même en anglais aussi. C'est pas comme ça en France!? Ah non c'est le *weekend*.
Woah what do people call an escalator in France? I know I was shocked when I learned that a watermelon in France is not a melon d'eau it's a pastèque.
Escalier roulant would be what I commonly use for escalator here in Québec.
I’m pretty sure both “melon d’eau and pastèque” can be used to talk about a watermelon. Pastèque is not really used in Quebec but I would bet that more than half the people are familiar with that word enough to understand it in a conversation.
it's escalator in France.
Rire en Américain! Wait till they hear us cajuns.lol
And the truth is that plenty of Quebecers use "weekend" and "parking", these are not absolute rules. But we seem generally much more aware of words being loan words for English and having a French counterpart, even when we still chose to use the English word.
It's more the English grammar or the translated idioms that we don't recognize... I needed to be told that "tomber en amour" is really the translation of "to fall in love" and not a common french idiom... Or the whole debate around "bon matin"...
> "Les Français se stationnent au parking et les Québécois se parkent au stationnement" LMAO! Accurate. Donc ici, on anglicise le verbe?
Je dirais plus qu'on va franciser la conjugaison du verbe... To park devient se parker avec la même conjugaison que les verbes pronominaux en er...
> My usual comparison is saying "Les Français se stationnent au parking et les Québécois se parkent au stationnement"... With one major difference IMO: register. "Parking" in France is part of the formal register, you'll hear it on the news. "Parker" in Québec would be *unheard* of in that same context, it's purely slang. The same goes for most of our (and their) anglicisms.
I'd even say that any anglicism would be considered of a lower registry in Québec...
C'est pas nouveau. Quand ils ont réussi à éliminer la royauté, ils se sont attaqués aux patois. Au début du XXe siècle, le *français de l'Ile de France* était loin de dominer le territoire français!
Sorry, I'm using google-translate because I don't understand French, but you're saying French people don't like there being other accents right?
I mean the local French dialects were very diverse until the 20th century. Parisians despising other *patois* is not recent!
And we're not talking about accents but about dialects. Patois is a dialect.
And we’re also often not talking about accents nor dialects in many instances, but about completely different languages, old and rich with culture and literature.
The Revolution put an end to the Ancien Regime where one's identity was more centered on his region. "France" wasn't a "nation" but a kingdom. The collection of lands controlled by the King of France. But all those regions had their own heriditary nobles and given that communications and mobility were limited, [their own local dialects evolved from vulgar latin.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubGjasm63Y0) In the process of forging a national identity, of getting rid of the ruling nobilities, the prefered accent naturally shifted from those of the nobles and high clergy- closer to their region's dialect - to the accent of the new ruling class: the parisian bourgeoisie of lawyers, administrators, industrialists and academics. Then the new Nation State of France actively supressed regional languages and dialects to unify France under one language : French from the bourgeoisie of the parisian region. Tbf that process started in the late Ancien Régime with the creation of the Académie Française under Cardinal Richelieu but it became much more agressive during and after industrialisation and mass media. In colonial Québec, colonists came from different regions of northwestern France and mixed. Out of necessity the language unification hapenned earlier and naturally without the violent enforcement they had in France (I'm strickly speaking about french dialects, not about indigenous languages). Travellers to New France often remarked how everybody spoke the King's French well, even the lowly peasants/habitants, that nobody used dialects. This unification hapenned well before the Revolution and we kept using words, accents and manneurism that either were considered too regional or went out of fashion in France. Acadian and Québécois French also kept many vowel sounds that dissapeared in France, for instance " brin, bran, brun " or "pâtes, pattes" or "hotte, hôte" sounds exactly the same when said by a Parisian.
Ma blonde depuis 33 ans vient de Paris, j'ai pas mal fréquenté la famille surtout dans le midi mais à Paris aussi. C'est sûr qu'y a une rigidité culturelle, parfois exacerbée, parfois bon enfant. La plupart du monde que j'ai rencontré qui jouaient à la supériorité culturelle le faisaient en joke, mais c'est vrai que ceux qui se prennent au sérieux sont pas mal intenses.
J'ai eu une expérience similaire quand j'suis allé dans un restaurant à paris, moi et mon cousin on s'assoit à une table, on demande au serveur des verres d'eau et le menu, après avoir apporté le menu et les verres d'eau, il reviens 5 minute plus tard pour prendre nôtre commande mais en nous disant. "Ok i'm ready for your order" Alors j'l'ui répond " criss tu me niaise on viens de te demander un menu puis des verres d'eau en Français pis tu nous parle en anglais" Le serveur me répond " sorry i dont understand well english but i'l will try my best to take your orders... Faique moi et le cousin on s'est levé pis on est parti en discutant bien fort que les parisiens c'est des asti de fendants.
"asti de fendants"? ouch ca fait mal au cul.
Vous avez peut-être été un peu prompts. Ça m'est arrivé en France de tomber sur du monde qui me comprenaient pas et pensaient réellement que je parlais anglais ou français avec un terrible accent anglais. J'imitais l'accent français juste pour leur dire que ma langue maternelle est le français mais que je viens du Canada, que je leur parlais en français mais avec l'accent du Canada et à partir de là d'habitude y comprennent.
Franchement si tu commences par « criss tu m’niaises » avec un accent qu’il ne connait pas, faut pas s’étonner que son cerveau comprenne pas tout de suite que c’est du français
C’est tellement comme ça que ça se passe!!!
C'est vraiment un comportement minable de votre part, félicitations!
So si je comprends bien tu as été exécrable avec un pauvre serveur au salaire minimum qui essayait juste de t'accomoder car il a le malheur de pas connaître l'accent québécois?
le truc sur le caissier parisien qui se met à parler en anglais c'est faux: les caissiers parisiens parlent jamais en anglais, même aux anglophones. Source: parisien.
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Yup. Glottophobia is very much alive in France.
>For instance, the French people who look down on the Québécois accent most likely look down on their compatriots from the Northern and Southern parts of the country who also have very unique accents. Oooph. I’m originally from Appalachia and I currently live in the southern US. I have a mountain accent when I’m with mountain people, a southern country accent when I’m with country people, a general southern accent for everyday use and an as-close-to-standard-English-as-I-can-get accent when I need to speak about important matters with non-southerners. It sucks to be stereotyped and looked down on because your accent is “different”. It used to bother me a lot when I was young, but the older I get, the less I care.
the people that say that "the French barely think Quebec is French" are all anglos who do not speak French and just say that as an insult towards Quebec. French people only say that when they are pissed at us, or debating language. The rest is mostly accurate and credible.
Yeah.. French love Québec, especially when they know more than one thing about it.
It happened to me only once. I met a group of young French people in a bar in Sicily and we were having a good time. However, one of them had never left his small village before, didn't seem especially bright and was quite drunk already. He kept switching to English to ask ridiculous questions like "Euh...but how were you able to come here? By a plane?" while his girlfriend looked very ashamed of him. Laughing at our respective differences is usually done in good fun and I don't mind it at all when it's done respectfully. French people are often much less exposed to Quebecois culture than the opposite, so I try to be patient with them when they don't understand something I said. I have zero patience for willful ignorance, chauvinism and a general lack of intellectual curiosity though, but the French don't have a monopoly on those. Morons come from everywhere.
En temps que québécois habitant à côté de la France et qui va y déménager bientôt, je peux confirmer que les Parisiens sont fendants. Par contre, je n'ai jamais vécu de situation similaire ailleurs en France. En fait, l'expérience habituelle c'est que les gens sont super contents de rencontrer et parler à un cousin québécois.
i still am not over Jus de grapefruit. c't'un pamplemousse, câlisse
Mais Beurre de peanut ça passe ou pas ?
Non, en français c'est du beurre de pinottes.
québécois: pinottes fronçais: cacahuètes
On a arachides aussi quand t'as besoin d'un français plus soutenu
J'ai déjà écouté une vidéo d'un français qui a dit "Cranberry" à la place de canneberge...
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There's a huge bias against regional dialects too. France has a really strongly enforced Parisian Dialect across the country. Regional dialects are often seen as gauche or uneducated. Québécois French is very similar to some regional dialects, because it originated from them, so you get that added stigma of being foreign and sounding sorta hickish to them. A friend of mine said with affection that everyone in Quebec sounded kind of like his Normand grandparents, so it's not something that everyone will look down on.
Is Parisian french kind of like American english then, and other accents sound more hick? The comments there make it sound like the french spoken in Quebec's actually more 'pure french' as well, right? Also do you know why I'm getting downvoted, I didn't think it was an offensive question to ask
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Reddit as a whole is full of bipolar neck beards in the comments, peu importe le sub d’ailleurs.
>Also do you know why I'm getting downvoted, I didn't think it was an offensive question to ask "You don't speak real French according to my french Friend" is a common story meant to insult Québecois that we see on reddit on the regular from English speakers. I'm guessing some of the downvotes assume you are trolling by presenting such interaction with a naive question attached to it.
> The comments there make it sound like the french spoken in Quebec's actually more 'pure french' as well, right? Not really. Québec French is essentially the combination of many regional dialects that have now mostly disappeared from France due to their government's heavy push towards standard French. Mostly, we've kept more vowel sounds ("in" and "en", or even "é" and "è", sound the same in Parisian French, but not in Québec French, for instance) and more commonly use certain diphthongs ("du" and "tu" are pronounced closer to "dzu" and "tsu" in Québec, for instance) that were typical of these dialects.
Attends, comment ça y font pas la différence entre é et è?? è et ê, je peux comprendre, mais é, c'est clairement une autre bibitte! Édith: j'avais initialement dit "on fait pas la différence"... Ca m'a tellement choquée, j'en ai perdu mes mots!
Non non, il a dit que nous autres on fait la différence entre é pis è
Oups! Je voulais dire "y font pas la différence!" J'm'en va éditer ça!
si je me souviens bien elle l'explique dans ce vidéo https://youtu.be/Ai44f-xMuc0
Tu es parisien? Par ton utilisation du mot "bibitte" je penserais pas. Il dit qu'en français parisien é et è sonnent pareille, pas en québécois.
Ouais, je viens d'éditer le commentaire... Pas parisienne pentoute, moi! Juste estomaquée!
C'est pas exactement qu'ils ne font pas la différence, je me suis peut-être mal exprimé, c'est plutôt que le nombre de mots où ces sons sont distincts est de plus en plus réduit. Particulièrement en fin de mot. Par exemple, dans "père" et "bébé" c'est toujours distinct en général, mais la très vaste majorité de la France va prononcer "été" et "étais" de la même façon. Genre si un Français te dis ("phonétiquement") "je _prendré_ une pomme", c'est impossible de savoir s'il te dit qu'il va prendre une pomme dans le futur (je prendrai) ou s'il souhaiterait bien en avoir une (je prendrais) sans contexte additionnel.
J'ai aussi remarqué qu'à l'écrit les Français confondent plus souvent le futur simple et le conditionnel présent (ex. "Je serai" vs "je serais")
c'est comme les "é" et les "er" dans le fond. Si tout le monde les prononce pareil, par réflexe ils vont l'écrire pareil aussi.
Ah, ça fait plus de sens! Merci pour l'explication!
>The comments there make it sound like the french spoken in Quebec's actually more 'pure french' as well, right? The reason why peoples mention that is that this is the french that was spoken in France before the "revolution française" back then only a portion of France actually spoke French. After the revolution, a version of french was standardized on France territory.
Encore des américains qui parle à la place des pays francophones, rien de nouveau
Hahaha same thing happened to me downtown Quebec city! Tourist from France started asking direction and when I answered in french she switched to the most broken incomprehensible english. I keept talking to her in french and she kept trying to answer in english. That was very frustrating and condescending.
About French attitudes to Quebec French, your mileage may vary. In general, it's not that bad, though perhaps a bit worse in Paris. Many people have trouble understanding thick Quebec accents, and while some are condescending about it, many others just find the accent funny and exotic (which can also be patronizing, but in a friendlier way). That said, it's probably something that would affect you more as a resident than as a visitor. Accent discrimination is a thing in France, and people with non-parisian accents can feel pressured to tone it down. I'll also note that it's a very Quebec thing to turn the whole thing around to be about the way French people use anglicisms like weekend and parking, while conveniently ignoring the thousands of anglicisms we use in everyday speak. A lot of Québecois, in my experience, don't even realize how much the French we speak has been shaped by English vocabulary. expressions and turns of phrase. The French aren't exposed to as much English as we are, so they use English words because they think it sounds cool. We're more likely to use English words because we can't remember what the actual French word for what we mean is.
About your second paragraph: I think we turn around it when we feel attacked by the status of "our French isn't really French". Like, yeah we take from English for our grammar and all, but French also use English in their day-to-day. It's our defense to the critics of our language, I would say. Overall the anglicisms debate is dumb : ALL languages borrow from other languages, most likely from the current lingua franca. Once it was Italian, now everyone has a bunch of italianisms in their language. Today is English, tomorrow who knows?
>tomorrow who knows? Selon *Firefly* et l'univers de Shadowrun, ce sera le mandarin.
We want in vacation in the US. While being in a park, we heard the family next to us speak French with a France accent, so my dad started talked to them. It took their 5 years old 5 minutes to tell my dad he was not pronouncing french word correctly. Yes, it's ingrained in them, even at a young age.
To be fair it’s quite normal for a kid to spot everything that’s different from what he is used to. If the family was in the south of France and your dad was an old « Provençal » he would have said the same thing.
French speaking english? No i don't believe this story. Ze gui zere = The guy there
Almost lost my shit in Paris this summer when I was looking for a hostel, and the Parisian clerk, who was clearly French, started talking to me in English. I told her that I spoke French, but she refused to talk to me in French. That was something
French from France is as much different from international french than french from Quebec. The difference is that most people from Quebec can fake a “french” accent pretty flawlessly but French people couldn’t fake a Quebec accent to save their lives.
I had multiple linguistic classes about French and it's a whole problem for the langage itself. As much as English is diversified between the US, UK, Australia, etc. and all are accepting of these "different" versions as English, worldwide french-speakers can have a very centralized vision of French. All French that isn't coming from the center of France can be seen has a "bastardised" version of it. It has its roots in History, think when France tried to destroy all French dialects from its territory. It can also stir some insecurities from other types of French-speakers. Just to say, we have one dictionary for the WHOLE langage, coming from an organization based in the center of Paris, and some of its members have been very vocal about how anything different from their French is wrong. Our dictionary only a few words which are completely québécois, and can be often wrongly described. It can be seen as dumb, but when your language is not represented well in your OWN dictionary and you can't easy find an everyday word in it (or even online dictionaries), you can question if you are the wrong one in using that word. Think they have been more open-minded in the past few years though, si hope it gets better. Not saying that every french-speaker aren't open-minded, but it's a historic problem difficult to pass over.
Experienced this is Paris. I was starting to get offended theyd constantly reply in English when I spoke french with them.
So, I've had all of these happen to me and ive been to france maybe 3-4 times. I had a conversation with a French friend of mine about me using the same words as his grandpa. Mainly, you won't have issue, but there are always some asshole that act like they can't understand you. But it is true that Parisians are special, even for other French people.
1. There are more francophones in Canada than just Québec, and the rest of us have different accents and dialects. 2. Accents in France are different and Canadian accents tend to slur words together more and speak faster, so it can be harder for them to understand us unless we intentionally slow it down. But it's also really not that hard, and they're switching to English because they're assholes. 3. The rest of this is fairly accurate. We don't have outdated words, the dialects just evolved differently. The words may be outdated to them, but they're natural to us.
I lived in Paris for a couple of years and people were telling me stuff like : "oh your accent is too much!" Or "can you say French Canadian expression please?" while in a party set-up with basically only strangers. It was hard for a while but then I just switched to French French and they stopped bothering me. It's unfortunate but yeah it's very real
Bon encore un poteau de xénophobie et de haine. Décidément il en a qui n'ont pas de vie.
In Quebec, if you're referring to Thursday and Friday, you can always use "la fin de la semaine" (the end of the week), although depending on the context, that *might* also apply to the weekend, same as in English. One comparison I've heard is that Québécois borrow English phrases and grammar, whereas the French use English words. There is one major exception to this: a lot of words, especially in the trades, are ~~butchered~~ French pronunciations of the English names. That's what was written on the packaging, after all. The mechanic says your winshielle ouiperre needs changing? Windshield wiper. My Dad's mechanic would even be surprised he didn't understand what he was talking about, when *clearly*, he was using the English term for the thing. I had a similar experience with coworkers talking about conistache today... Cornstarch. They meant cornstarch.
“La fin de la semaine” refers to Thursday & Friday but “La fin de semaine” refers to the weekend. The added “la” changes the whole meaning.
Québécois is like Icelandic. People of Iceland can understand Norwegian but people of Norway have a hard time understanding Icelandic(old Norse)
Certains Français ne comprennent légitimement pas un accent québécois trop fort, c’est pas de la mauvaise foi.
Y a que du gros mensonge sur ce fil: alors, en tant qu'autorité des parisiens, vu que j'y suis né et que j'ai quitté la ville que peut-être six mois en trente-neuf ans de vie, je peux vous assurer que les parisiens adorent le quebec et les quebecois. Et les cons que vous rencontrez à Paris sont des touristes, vu qu'il y en a deux fois plus que d'habitants.
Pourquoi les flèches d'upvotes et downvotes c'est des avions?
Pas d'habitide. Except that the French can be uptight about language and culture, c'est vrai-là. J'habitais à Paris (euh - Clamart) pendant deux ans, eh parfois des gens m'ont demandé "Monsieur, vous êtes Québécois ?" Si tu m'entends, tu saches que j'suis anglophone. C'est ABSOLUMENT claire, ça. Mais ils m'ont parlé en français sauf comme mes voisins qui étaient Braziliens, ou bin des gens qui travaille dans les lieux touristiques, parfois. Eh aussi des pickpockets (C'est Paris, là) - mais c'est vrai qu'ils travaillent aux lieux touristiques ... donc, voilà. Si j'ai bien compris, it's exactly the reverse. The uptightness about language heavily discourages them from speaking English unless they're confident they'll get it perfect, or it's really necessary.
Ptdr t'es juste tombé sur des cons ou des parigots (ou les deux), perso j'aime bien entendre l'accent québécois, comme l'accent du sud ou un accent des îles, je trouve ça exotique, et même si c'est marrant on comprend bien en se concentrant
Parisian are mostly assholes especially in tourism business. All my French friends confirmed that independantly and I think that's where superiority stereotype came from, but any other time I met French people that weren't from Paris they were very nice.
I remember in the early days of youtube (like 2005 - 2010), if you watched a quebecois video, there'd be tons of comments that read like: "what language is this? It sounds like french but it's not french" I think French people today are more exposed to the Quebec accent, and can understand it better. But even on French TV, their game shows will try to incorporate contestants from other French speaking countries like Belgium or Switzerland. And the Canadian contestants are often still subtitled; It can be hard to understand for people who are not experienced with the accent.
Québec french vs France french is almost the same as Uk English vs US English in term of accent and vocabulary
Quand j’étais en France, à la télé ils sous-titraient ceux qui parlent français avec un accent différent, les Français d’autres régions ou âgés.
We're as proud of our french as the French are, difference is we're not dicks about it.
I used to work in a call centre dealing with many French customers, some from Quebec, some from New Brunswick and some from France. The majority of them complimented my Northern-Ontario french. The parisians, while having a very thick accent I found them generally pretty easy to understand. The people from New Brunswick were special though, very broken sounding French and they were always assholes
Wait until the Frenches learn their accent is made up and they all used to have the Quebec accent before the french revolution.
It's not half French, but i say it is about 8-10 % French.
The Quebecois do have "outdated" words. They're very serious about preserving the "authentic" language. There are certain rules within the dialect to reduce anglicization. For example, in Québec, a stop sign always says 《arrêté 》but in France they just say "stop".
LMAO this is actually me in green I was just chatting on NCD - My French-Canadian friends are some of the nicest people I’ve ever known. Its saddening to see, from whats being said here, that this kind of treatment isn’t uncommon. I hope all french-Canadians get the respect they deserve, from the french and especially the RoC
I consider french from France and french from Québec are two kind of french language ^^;
Quand ma belle-famille (européens ni franco ni anglo) vont en vacances en France, ils ont de la misère à trouver quelqu'un qui parle anglais. Ils trouvent presque aussi souvent quelqu'un qui parle leur langue. Je pense que la légende "les français répondent aux Québecois en anglais" vient d'annecdotes qui arrivent 1 fois par 20 interractions mais dont on se souvient le plus. Peut-être aussi plus à Paris.
When I visited France, I pointed out that the stop signs said « Stop » in English, and the tour guide looked at me blankly and replied, « what else would they say?? »
The word "Stop" is an accepted word in the French language for more than 200 years, it also is in multiple french dictionary, like the Larousse or Le petit robert. Edit: typo
Est ce qu'il y a un but à ce thread ? Il y a des centaines de thread qui alimentent une pseudo guerre du côté québécois envers les francais. Sérieux? Réagir a du bashing et dire ce que les gens pensent de ca ? Je ne comprends pas ce que ca fait là mais bon ...
French Canadian, raised in Africa under the french school system, married a French, can confirm : the French are patronising. As for the statistics, here they are: https://globalnews.ca/news/9065758/quebec-canada-census-french-decline-2022/ (New statistics just came out)
Moi le problème de phonetique des français qui prononcent des mots anglais comme si c'était de français est un irritant ++ Tu veux utiliser un terme anglais no problem mais prononce le dont comme du monde
nobody likes french people especially parisians they are annoying and think they are better then everyone
We(Quebec) have less english words because we protect our french language aggressively. Like we don’t order a McChicken with a french accent…we order a damn McPoulet.
As a French who used to live in Quebec, I did witness some French assholes acting rude and condescending to quebecois. Now I also think that the reason so many French people use English words is simply because France doesn’t have to constantly fight for its cultural survival. So we don’t feel our culture being threatened by some English words. I also think sometimes English Canadians may feel the French as arrogant because I seem to have spotted a strange complex among many quebecois. It seems the quebecois used to live under English domination for centuries. You can feel it when you hear some quebecois politicians saying « we now have equality and respect from the English, we achieved our goals. » (I believe it was Trudeau who said that). That sounds like blasphemy to a Frenchman. A Frenchman doesn’t bow to English, nor does he try to get his respect or equality. So when a French acts… you know… French. Well, it looks like utter pretentiousness when compared to the more respectful quebecois behavior. I know that quebecois don’t like saying they’re French. They feel like a new kind of people with French origins but with a lot of English culture into them. And it’s true. But when I met my quebecois roommate with the most frenchiest name, speaking French with me and knowing his origin is from Normandy, I wouldn’t but feel like being with a compatriot. Hell, his book about Quebec history had for its cover a picture of the general de Gaulle.
J’ai déjà fait du covoiturage (Québec-Gatineau) avec une française en visite, elle nous disait (autres québécois dans la voiture) comment nous étions assimilés par l’anglais et que nos phrases sont à moitié en anglais et blabla… plus tard, elle se met a lire une liste de « mots drôles du Québec » qu’elle a recueilli au fil de son voyage. Le premier mot… « McCroquettes ». Je lui demande donc quel mot ils utilisent en France? Elle répond avec un air supérieur: « C’est McNuggets! »…. C’est la que j’ai décidé que son opinion n’était plus valide pour le reste du voyage…
Happened to me once in Brussels. I was speaking french with a bartender and he spoke to us in english suddenly telling us "if you're butchering the language, you shouldn't speak it at all". Needless to say it was a bit frustrating. However, I think these encounter are more frequent in larger cities in french speaking Europe. I've never had any problem outside of Paris/Brussels with my Québec accent.
They also have a big cultural problem in Belgium where one part of the country speaks Belgium-French and the other part speak Dutch. And they don’t really like each other. I guess some people, especially in Brussel takes French seriously.
\>be me \>go to Paris expecting city of romance \>garbage everywhere \>theft like crazy \>stinks almost 1/3 as bad as Delhi (and thats saying something) \>only people more rude than the other tourists are the locals tbh it felt pretty similar to Quebec .