Québécois French
Québécois French also called the Québécois language is an array of dialects that developed out of early regional French languages. It is also called a type of Canadian French which is spoken by the Quebecois people of the province of Quebec, Canada.
Québécois, while substantially different in pronunciation and vocabulary, is easily comprensible to a French national or Belgian speaking French. This is due to the long history of French in Canada and the fact that French immigrants to Canada were largely from areas outside Paris (see King's Daughters). It was this Parisian French that eventually became the national, standardized language of France at the time of the French Revolution.
Many in France and Belgium do have some problem understanding Québécois, especially when spoken informally. Quebec television shows and movies when shown in France and other francophone countries have to be subtitled in the standard form of French because of these differences.
Although the two (especially more standard lects) are quite intercomprehensible, modern Québécois shows several distinctions from the French spoken in France (hereafter French).
One well-known distinction is a tendency to affricate dental stops before high front vowels and semivowels: the second-person pronoun tu/ in the French, is / in Québécois (n.b.: phonetic transcription in X-SAMPA.)
Québécois also contains a much wider range of vowel allophones than the standard French; for example, the masculine and feminine adjectives petit and petite, /p@ti/ and /p@tit/ in French, are /p@tsi/ and /p@tsIt/ in Québécois. Similar pre-voiceless consonant allophony are to be found with the vowels /y/ -> /o/O/, and /u/ -> /U/.
Long and nasalized vowels in standard French are often diphthongized in Québécois père (father), /pE:r/ in France, is /pEjr/ in Québécois, and banque (bank), /ba~k/ in standard French, is /ba~w~k/ in Québécois.
Older speakers often use a rolled r rather than the fricative used in standard French and modern Québécois.
Furthermore, there are various lexical differences between Québécois and French. Many of these are forms that are archaic in standard French, such as espérer for "to wait" (attendre in French). Cour in Québécois is a backyard (jardin in standard French), whereas in French a cour has dropped this meaning and primarily means a courtyard, plus other derived meanings like courthouse (palais de justice in Québécois)).
Some of them are borrowings or calques from English, such as bines ("beans") or full ("very"). Banc de neige is a calque of the English "snowbank" (French, "congère").
The presence of English borrowings is often a cause of stigmatization (see below). However, especially in modern items, Québécois often contains forms that are more "French" than standard French, like fin de semaine which is week-end continental French, courriel for standard French e-mail or mèl. Some are bizarre, such as un chien chaud for standard French hot dog. Although many of these forms were promulgated by the Office de la Langue Française (OLF) of Quebec, they have been accepted into everyday use. (To be fair, some of these francized terms are often used in standard French too.)
A joke runs that the difference between standard European French and Québécois is that in France and Belgium, on se gare dans un parking and in Quebec, on se parque dans un stationnement.
There are also words for Quebec specialties that do not exist in France or Belgium, for example poutine, cégep, pets de sœurs ("nuns' farts," a kind of pastry), and dépanneur (a corner store/small grocery; dépanneur in France is a mechanic who comes in to repair a car or a household appliance).
One of the more hazardous differences is the fact that gosses ("boys" or "sons" in France) means "testicles" in Québécois. In standard French, potatoes are pommes de terre (literally 'earth apples') whereas in Québécois they are patates, which translates as 'spuds'. A used or 'second-hand' car in standard French is une voiture d'occasion, but in Québécoisit is un char de seconde-main. (In standard French, char means 'cart' or 'waggon'.)
Finally, there are many idioms in Québécois that do not exist in France, such as mets-en ("I'll say"), fait que ("so"), s'en venir (for arriver and venir ici), and of course the art of sacrer. Speakers of also use the informal second-person pronoun tu in more contexts than speakers in France do.
Québécois has a variety of dialects, ranging from formal Québécois, strongly influenced by modern French and with phonological features softened, to joual. Significant regional differences exist when comparing, for example, the Québécois of Montreal, Quebec City, and the Saguenay. For example, Montreal Québécois diphthongizes in more contexts than Quebec City Québécois.
Québécois is the most prominent language of Canadian French, and most French-Canadians have similar dialects. However, the Acadians have a separate dialect, Acadian French. See also Michif.
Québécois has often been stigmatized, among the Quebecois people themselves as well as among the Continental French and anglophones, as a low-class dialect, sometimes due to its use of anglicisms, sometimes simply due to its differences from the standard French. However, some writers and thinkers, especially Michel Tremblay, are trying to improve the image of Québécois and promote its use as a distinct and vigorous language.
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