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Speaking Parisian French to Canadians | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6338 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes  | Message 17 of 43 22 May 2011 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is relatively easy to spot English people in quebec, because of that typical accent.
My thinking is that for folks who are trying to pick up quebecois without living here they have to be really aware of what they are trying to accomplish. At least to me, I find it very strange to hear people mix in quebec slangs and speech without an authentic accent. In fact, there is a funny commercial on TV (wine ?) that shows some Italians trying to impress a quebec tourist. The poor guy does not seem to get it at all. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5237 days ago 63 posts - 80 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 18 of 43 23 May 2011 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Honestly, just speak however you want. It's not like Parisian French is never heard here. Movies dubbed in French are almost always dubbed in International French and there are a lot of African/ Middle Eastern people living in Montreal with accents similar to Parisian French. Edited by Nature on 23 May 2011 at 12:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 19 of 43 23 May 2011 at 7:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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For those interested in comparing the Québécois and European accents, the site www.langcal.com should be of interest. In passing, their calendar products are in my opinion excellent, but that is another issue. On the website there are 420 model sentences spoken in a slow Québécois voice, a normal-speed Québécois voice and a Continental French accent (no necessarily Parisian as such). The recordings are available for free.
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| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5693 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 20 of 43 24 May 2011 at 1:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry for being slightly off-topic, but I hope I might ask a (perhaps stupid) question: is the French spoken by francophones in Ontario basically the same as Québécois French? Or does the accent vary between provinces? (I know there are far fewer francophones in other Canadian provinces, but I assume there must be at least a few native Ontarians who speak French...)
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 21 of 43 24 May 2011 at 6:43am | IP Logged | |||||
Depends where. Ontario is pretty big. If the community is near the Québec border, then it's the same as what's used on the other side of the border (there are variations within Québec too), especially since a significant portion of the population is from Québec, but as you move away, English influence is stronger, and you start finding traits similar to what you had in Québec 2 or 3 generations ago, such as trilled R. Edited by Arekkusu on 24 May 2011 at 3:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 22 of 43 25 May 2011 at 11:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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Accent is a bit of a broad question and often tends to go beyond just the question of phonetics. Arekkusu is right in his observations. What I would add is that there is so much immigration and movement of populations that you now have many accents, including Québécois and non-Canadian, in these francophone communities outside of Québec.
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| pelagia Newbie United States Joined 4935 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Studies: French, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 23 of 43 25 May 2011 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My mother is from Québec. I have a mostly Québecois accent, but I have a lot of
Parisian vocabulary because I have learned Parisian French in schools for about 8 years now (I live in the United States). If you were a native French speaker, yeah, a lot of Québecois would not like the Parisian accent. But that's mainly because most people from France don't bother to try to learn the Québec accent, whereas people in Québec know the accent in France. The main way you see this is in media. As a foreigner, just the fact that you are trying to speak French will make Québeckers happy; because most anglophones in Canada don't make the attempt, even though they learned basic French in school. It's all about the intention, not if you say "soulier" or "chaussures". We have a French CBC channel at home, but I get frustrated trying to watch Québec- produced shows, because they are subtitled in Parisian French (because that Québecois accent is just too dang weird, innit?). Having the subtitles *not* reflect what I'm hearing, and taking out all of the good Québec slang, is quite frustrating. And it's not like French media is translated into the "Québec accent" for the Québecois. Thinking about it, I guess it would be like if people in Britian pretended they could not understand the American accent. Or Americans pretending they couldn't understand an Australian accent. The accents pronounce words a little differently and use some different vocab, but you wouldn't care if a foreigner was talking to you in Australian or American English; just that they weren't trying to talk to you in whatever they native language is. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5956 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 24 of 43 25 May 2011 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting discussion. My daughter has been attending an early immmersion French language elementary school out here in Vancouver. The teachers at the school represent a mixture of European French native speakers, Quebec French native speakers and a few English native speakers who have learned French proficiently as a second language. The differences in pronunciaton are reasonably significant between these groups even to my ears, and while I believe that a standard (largely European) approach regarding idiomatic expression is adopted, I understand that there is some vocabulary that is uniformly used that is more typical for Canadian French than European French. Not in any way to be provocative, but I believe that a majority of the parents out here have a clear preference for the European accent. There are likely as many different reasons for that as there are parents, I suppose. Some of it might possibly reflect attitudes towards Quebec, sadly, but I honestly believe that would be only a very minor factor. A more prominent factor for this decided preference may well be many of the kids at the school are of a European or non-Canadian background - my daughter's classmates are of Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Romanian, Mexican, Norwegian, Chinese and Japanese backgrounds. French immersion schools in B.C. are popular choices for families whose children were raised in a language other than English. I expect a European French accent is more familiar to the parents of many of these kids than a Quebec accent. Out of interest if any of you know, how would you characterize French in New Brunswick? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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