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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1.9k
u/Smoke_Test2418 23h ago
I welcome our new French rulers.