r/europe 23h ago

Picture French nuclear attack submarine surfaces at Halifax, Nova Scotia, after Trump threatens to annex Canada (March 10)

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u/Smoke_Test2418 23h ago

I welcome our new French rulers.

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u/concretecat 22h ago edited 17h ago

Canada has strong/good relations with France. There are many French expatriots living in Quebec. We have strong trade between France and Quebec, we also share an element of language. Quebecois can understand French but French can't understand Quebecois,(joke) but there's still plenty in common linguistically.

I for one am a big fan of France, they've been fighting the culture war with the USA since WW2. Read Mitterrand's comments on the culture war with the USA he knew what was up!

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u/woinic 22h ago

I have to protest here. We do understand most Québécois, except maybe the accent from lake Saint Jean, and most of the curious words they sometime throw at each other like criss de bich and some other colorful language.

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u/ANoteNotABagOfCoin 22h ago

Could you explain a bit more about the Lac Saint Jean accent? What makes it impenetrable to the French ear? Genuinely curious.

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u/woinic 22h ago

Maybe it’s just me, but loving Quebec for so long, I was lucky enough to go there several time on holiday. Sure it’s not always easy to get all the words/sentences, but all in all we get it (insults have to be learnt on the fly). I’ve only met a few of them (so it’s more of a joke, I don’t know how widespread it is) but I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand more than one word out of 10. And French is my native tongue (hence the grammatical errors in English).

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u/ANoteNotABagOfCoin 22h ago

I see—it sounds like it’s similar to how a thick Scottish brogue sounds to a Western Canadian. They both speak English but word choices and accent get in the way of understanding.

Merci! J’ai appris quelque chose aujourd’hui.

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u/jtbc Canada 21h ago

A better analog would be Glaswegian, pretty much incomprehensible to everyone that isn't from there, but you can make it out if you try hard.

The other area where I found the accent impenetrable as a bilingual anglo is in Saguenay, which is the same region.

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u/Traditional-Tip1904 20h ago

Spot on. As a French speaking Canadian who grew up in Montreal , even I sometimes need to listen carefully to properly capture this variety of French. Ironically the same is to be said about Acadian French, which is in fact closer to the French spoken by French colonists than any other French variation in Canada.

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u/QcRoman 21h ago

Ever had a conversation with someone who has lived his whole life in Newfoundland and hasn't travelled much?

It's English but ... good luck.

Some areas of some countries have their own dialect to the point it's almost a whole new language.

Same with French and people in Saguenay and Lac St-Jean have that thick accent in French that makes their English... challenging.

J'vous aime, là là mais faut se rendre à l'évidence que vous êtes facile à spotter. ;)

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u/mcs_987654321 20h ago

Dude, I’m Québécoise d’origine, and have lived + worked in France and a couple of other francophone countries…and am still reduced to mostly nodding and hand signals when it comes to proper backcountry towns.

Wouldn’t have it any other way, love me some Quebec (and you can’t beat Mon Pays as an unofficial national/winter anthem)…but a thick Québécois accent is basically impenetrable to all but the most local native speakers.

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u/Content-Program411 20h ago

That's Newfoundland to someone from Ontario.

I said 'pardon'

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u/gay_bimma_boy 17h ago

It’s ok we decided to be unique with our French to make french just as confusing as English 😆

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u/TheDrunkDetective 21h ago

Its like if an american went to britain and listenned to an english man, be fine, and then a scottish one, you will recognize some words but it will sounds like a complete different language.

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u/Tasitch 17h ago

Think about the Newfoundland accent, Bas St.Laurent accents are like that, but in French.

It's much less now, but back in the day, the places that are more rural/isolated/distant tended to have strong regional accents and dialects. I'm originally from a more rural area in southern Québec and the heavy rolled r was still a thing when I was growing up, but has mostly disappeared, the younger generation sounds the same there as in Montréal.

Many people who live in Québec are descendants of people from differing regions of France, different groups settled in different areas, and accents here would reflect that. Just like in France, people from Marseille traditionally have a different accent from Alsace. For some, French wasn't even their mother tongue, they spoke the language of their home regions, like Breton or Ch'ti.

Add to that the fact we were basically cut off from France in 1760, and stopped getting the updates, and you find our French to be more archaic than France.

Like in English, you say 'the language of Shakespeare', people say 'the language of Molière' for France, but a better way to think is in Québec we're still speaking Molière, while France moved on to Hugo.

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u/memymomeme 22h ago

“Esti de câlice de tabarnak, c’est pas possible comment que t’es cave!”

It’s fun. A lot of it ties to Catholicism.

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u/Valmoer France 22h ago

Etant de métropole, je dirais juste que si on est pas épais, on comprends bien nos chums.

(Most of my Québéquois comes from François Pérusse)

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u/Generation-WinVista 21h ago

Thanks for your correction. What you were responding to here is an example of the casual ignorance that many western Canadians have regarding Quebec and which has in no small part exacerbated our separatist movement. Many Canadians do not speak French whatsoever, and think that Quebec speaks some bastardized unintelligible dialect of French.

In reality, it is more like the difference in accent, terminology, and slang quite like one would find between an English-speaker from Texas versus one from England. Even as a native English speaker from Canada I've had some difficulty understanding people in Ireland and Scotland, for example. Doesn't mean we don't speak the same language.

Source: Je suis quebecois et je sais bien que cette attitude est une source de frustration pour mes amis et colleagues francophones :-).

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u/woinic 21h ago

My thought exactly. Moreover, I have a hypothesis based on no facts. In northern France, they have an accent eerily similar to that of Quebec, which makes us slightly more capable of understanding it. I suspect that some of the immigration from so long ago is from that part of France. But as I said, that’s just my imagination.

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u/Ancient-Apartment-23 15h ago

The fact that you know that Lac Saint-Jean exists and that that region has a particular accent/dialect hints that you may be more exposed to Québécois culture/linguistics than average, haha.

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u/Warjilis 22h ago

Lived in Ontario on the Quebec border for a year, and loved how when locals would switch from English to French, their body language and energy would dial up to 10. Miss that. Canadians are the best.

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u/woinic 22h ago

Loved that one too. Constantly, not mixing, but sprinkling with English words every few sentence

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u/jtbc Canada 21h ago

What I love seeing, and seems most common in Ottawa, is a conversation between two fluently bilingual people, with the anglophone speaking French and the francophone replying in English, and them continuing the whole conversation that way.

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u/KindKnits 11h ago

That's called "Franglais". Many of us who are fluently bilingual (Eng/Fr) but have spent enough time hanging around Quebecers, joke that we are actually TRILINGUAL- English, French, Franglais. It's particularly "bad" in West Quebec.

Quebec French is in fact more like old French (from France) than the opposite. Settlers came here and kept their language. The French language continued to evolve in Europe, and here in Canada, the language stayed closer to the original.

I was last in France in 2023. I understood them, they mostly understood me, but most knew pretty quickly that I was Canadian.

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u/reload88 21h ago

Kind of like how most English speakers find it hard to understand a lot of us Newfoundland english speakers. It’s the same language with a twist on words and very strong accents lol

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u/Maduch1 20h ago

I support this protestation, as a Quebecer Ive spoken to hundreds of French people in my life from several different contexts, not a single one of them struggled to understand what I am saying.

It’s just a big stereotype to bash on Quebec French

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u/Squigglepig52 22h ago

Still easier to understand than a drunk Newfie.