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Are there French regional accents ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 9 of 17 17 September 2010 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Woah woah tabernak, I didn't mean to step on anyone's toes.
I'm talking dialects, not sociolects, so this excludes differences within the same city. However, if you travel to different parts of the country, rural Quebecois accents can make the language unintelligible or nearly so, while in France accents tend to remain within a certain range. As for suppressing the accent, that's just one experience I had. I was talking to a French person here in Berlin and at point I thought I had heard a funny R and I asked him if he was from the south. He looked uncomfortable at that and didn't use that kind of R anymore. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 10 of 17 17 September 2010 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd tend to say that there are more regional accents in France than Sprachprofi is insinuating, and more regional accents in Québec than s_allard is suggesting.
I'm from outside Montréal, though still at the edges of the conglomeration, and my town has its own accent (which I don't have), which differs from that of people from other towns around. My extended family lives across the St. Lawrence river and their accents are different, and even differ from eachother. Now that I think of it, this presents a much bigger diversity than in the English-speaking city where I live now. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6035 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 11 of 17 17 September 2010 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Many thanks for the great link! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 17 17 September 2010 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've only spent about 8 hours in class with my current tutor, so her accent hasn't affected mine, which is more based on the standard accent used in learning materials and films. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| grunts67 Diglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5303 days ago 215 posts - 252 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 13 of 17 18 September 2010 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||
On the matter, I think Arekkusu is right. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5592 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 14 of 17 18 September 2010 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think that there are regional accents in every language and, depending on how sharp your hearing is (mine is terrible)you will be able to detect them. I think some are quite obvious and others much more subtle.This is not to say that everyone has one. I think many people have learned to overcome them and speak with a more "neutral" accent. When under stres, the accents become more (forgive the pun) pronounced.
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| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5670 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 17 18 September 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There definitely are regional accents in France, but not as much anymore as say 50 years ago. Younger people tend to speak more of a standardized "Parisian" French, whereas their parents and grandparents often still have some sort of regional accent. Regional accents are also much stronger in rural areas than in the cities. The most recognizable one is probably the accent of the South, but each region has its own accent, in the north, close to the Belgian border, the accent is influenced by Dutch and in Alsace, you can hear a slight German touch.
I also believe that every country has regional differences, it's inevitable. Even in a minuscule country such as Luxembourg, people from the north sound different from the people in the south, even if they only live 50 km apart. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 16 of 17 18 September 2010 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
The problem with any these kinds of discussions is that unless one refers to concrete objective observations, it's all a matter of subjective interpretation. As a starting point, I suggest people read the excellent wikipedia article on Quebec French and the section on its accents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French The issue isn't the existence of accents. Let me remind everybody that the main point of discussion here is Sprachprofi's assertion that, "Also, within Quebec, accent differences are bigger than within France." My view is that this is not true. I'm questioning how this judgment is founded. Are we supposed to believe that there is less of a distance in France between chtimi of Northern France and the accent of Marseille? I would suggest that it is the contrary. I think people are mixing up different things. Regional accents, as we know, develop out of linguistic isolation within geographic boundaries. When the isolation breaks down because of social changes such as immigration and emigration, standardized education, the melting pot of military service, centralized administration, television and radio, etc. the regional accents will become attenuated and tend to be concentrated in the less educated and more sedentary classes of society. So, on the one hand, the French regional accents are still present, obviously not as prominent as in the early 20th century. On the other hand, there is a standardization of the language of the elite that has been mentioned before. But the regional accents have not disappeared, all the more so that France has a number of regional languages such as Breton, Basque, Occitan, Corsican, Provençal and Catalan, all of which interact with the French spoken locally. To complicate matters, in all the major cities there are now urban vernaculars that have arisen in the poorer areas and often with large immigrant populations. As I have said before, if the only French you hear is that of movies and television and you only speak with highly educated strata of society, you will get the impression of homogeneity. But dig more deeply and you will see much variation. In Quebec, the situation is not very different in the sense that there is a homogenization of the language of the elite. And, as I have said, about half the entire population of Quebec lives in the Montreal region. So, when we talk about regional accents, often we are talking about small numbers of people. One very striking regional accent in Quebec is that of the Magdalen Islands or Iles-de -la-Madeleine (population 13,000) at the extreme eastern border of Quebec. A couple of years ago there was a tragic accident with a fishing boat from one of the islands. I saw on television an interview with fisherman and also with the mayor of the major town. The fisherman of course had a very characteristic accent. But the mayor, who seemed to be in his mid-thirties sounded very much like a university graduate from any large city. I remember at the time being very struck by the contrasting accents. So far I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that the differences between accents in Quebec, of which there are many nuances, are greater that what can be seen in France. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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