French, Quebecois
Created | Updated Mar 23, 2002
A variant of the French spoken in France, but bearing only a passing resemblance to the French approved and promoted by the Academie de la langue francaise in that country.
Vowel sounds are broadened significantly and nasalized; the French word "oui," for instance, comes out much more like the sound a duck makes than the English word "we." The vocabulary of Quebecois French borrows heavily from English, especially in technical and technological matters, where English is the lingua franca.
In its extreme form, as spoken by fishermen and other hard manual labourers far from Quebec's urban centres, Quebec French is known as "joual," and it is quite possible that a Frenchman would be unable to understand a fluent speaker. In that dialect, profanity is more offensive than obscenity, and the most extreme forms of rude expression--"Tabarnac! Calice!"--draw upon religious, rather than scatological sources.
It is tempting for an English speaker to make enthusiastic use of such apparently innocuous exclamations. If you are travelling in Quebec, resist the temptation. Invoking God when you swear in a deeply Catholic region is likely to get you into much deeper trouble than invoking body parts in a place where Puritanism went out of fashion a hundred or more years ago.
Vowel sounds are broadened significantly and nasalized; the French word "oui," for instance, comes out much more like the sound a duck makes than the English word "we." The vocabulary of Quebecois French borrows heavily from English, especially in technical and technological matters, where English is the lingua franca.
In its extreme form, as spoken by fishermen and other hard manual labourers far from Quebec's urban centres, Quebec French is known as "joual," and it is quite possible that a Frenchman would be unable to understand a fluent speaker. In that dialect, profanity is more offensive than obscenity, and the most extreme forms of rude expression--"Tabarnac! Calice!"--draw upon religious, rather than scatological sources.
It is tempting for an English speaker to make enthusiastic use of such apparently innocuous exclamations. If you are travelling in Quebec, resist the temptation. Invoking God when you swear in a deeply Catholic region is likely to get you into much deeper trouble than invoking body parts in a place where Puritanism went out of fashion a hundred or more years ago.
