Quebec French

Quebec French (French: français québécois [fʁɑ̃sɛ kebekwa]), also known as Québécois French, is the predominant variety of the French language spoken in Canada. It is the dominant language of the province of Quebec, used in everyday communication, in education, the media, and government.
Canadian French is a common umbrella term to describe all varieties of French used in Canada, including Quebec French. Formerly it was used to refer solely to Quebec French and the closely related dialects spoken in Ontario and Western Canada, in contrast with Acadian French, which is spoken in some areas of eastern Quebec (Gaspé Peninsula), New Brunswick, and in other parts of Atlantic Canada, as well as Métis French, which is found generally across the Prairie provinces.
The term joual is commonly used to refer to Quebec working class French (when considered a basilect), characterized by certain features often perceived as phased out, "old world" or "incorrect" in standard French. Joual, in particular, exhibits strong Norman influences largely owing to Norman immigration during the Ancien Régime; people from Normandy were perceived as true Catholics and allowed to emigrate to the new world as an example of ideal French settlers. The Acadian French equivalent of joual is called Chiac.
The origins of Quebec French lie in the 17th- and 18th-century regional varieties (dialects) of early modern French, also known as Classical French, and of other langues d'oïl (especially Poitevin dialect, Saintongeais dialect, Norman and Picard) that French colonists brought to New France. Quebec French either evolved from this language base and was shaped by the following influences (arranged according to historical period) or was imported from Paris and other urban centres of France as a koiné, or common language shared by the people speaking it.
Unlike the language of France in the 17th and 18th centuries, French in New France was fairly well unified. It acquired loan words, especially place names such as Québec, Canada and Hochelaga, and words to describe the flora and fauna such as atoca (cranberry) and achigan (largemouth bass), from First Nations languages.
The importance of the rivers and ocean as the main routes of transportation also left its imprint on Quebec French. Whereas European varieties of French use the verbs monter and descendre for "to get in" and "to get out" of a vehicle (lit. 'to mount' or 'to dismount', as one does with a horse or a carriage), the Québécois variety in its informal register tends to use embarquer and débarquer, a result of Quebec's navigational heritage.
With the onset of British rule in 1760, the French of Canada became isolated from that of Europe. This led to a retention of older pronunciations, such as moé for moi (audio comparison) and expressions that later died out in France. In 1774, the Quebec Act guaranteed French settlers as British subjects rights to French law, the Roman Catholic faith and the French language to appease them at a moment when the English-speaking colonies to the south were on the verge of revolting in the American Revolution.
In the period between the Act of Union of 1840 and 1960, roughly 900,000 French Canadians left Canada to emigrate to the United States to seek employment. The ones that returned, brought with them new words taken from their experiences in the New England textile mills and the northern lumber camps. As a result, Quebec French began to borrow from both Canadian and American English to fill accidental gaps in the lexical fields of government, law, manufacturing, business and trade.
From the Quiet Revolution to the passing of the Charter of the French Language, the French language in Quebec saw a period of validation in its varieties associated with the working class while the percentage of literate and university-educated francophones grew. Laws concerning the status of French were passed both on the federal and provincial levels. The Office québécois de la langue française was established to play an essential role of support in language planning. Protective laws and distaste towards anglicisms arose at the same time to preserve the integrity of Quebec French, while Metropolitan French on the other hand does not have that same protective attitude and in recent decades has been more influenced by English, causing Quebec French not to borrow recent English loanwords that are now used in Metropolitan French.
There is a continuum of intelligibility between Quebec and European French; the two are most intelligible in their more standardized forms and pose more difficulties in their dialectal forms. If a comparison can be made, the differences between both varieties are analogous to those between American and British English even if differences in phonology and prosody for the latter are greater.
Quebec's culture has only recently gained exposure in Europe, especially since the Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille). The difference in dialects and culture is large enough that speakers of Quebec French overwhelmingly prefer their own local television dramas or sitcoms to shows from Europe or the United States. Conversely, certain singers from Quebec have become very famous even in France, notably Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Céline Dion, and Garou. Some television series from Quebec such as Têtes à claques and L'Été indien are also known in France. The number of such shows from France shown on Quebec television is about the same as the number of British shows on American television even though French news channels like France 24 and a francophone channel based in France, TV5 Québec Canada, are broadcast in Quebec. Nevertheless, Metropolitan French series such as The Adventures of Tintin and Les Gens de Mogador are broadcast and known in Quebec. In certain cases, on French TV, subtitles can be added when barbarisms, rural speech and slang are used, not unlike cases in the US of a number of British programmes being shown with subtitles (notably from Scotland).
Historically speaking, the closest relative of Quebec French is the 17th and 18th-century koiné of Paris.
Formal Quebec French uses essentially the same orthography and grammar as the French of France, with few exceptions, and exhibits moderate lexical differences. Differences in grammar and lexicon become more marked as language becomes more informal.
While phonetic differences also decrease with greater formality, Quebec and European accents are readily distinguishable in all registers. Over time, European French has exerted a strong influence on Quebec French. The phonological features traditionally distinguishing informal Quebec French and formal European French have gradually acquired varying sociolinguistic status, so that certain traits of Quebec French are perceived neutrally or positively by Quebecers, while others are perceived negatively.
Sociolinguistic studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s showed that Quebecers generally rated speakers of European French heard in recordings higher than speakers of Quebec French in many positive traits, including expected intelligence, education, ambition, friendliness and physical strength. The researchers were surprised by the greater friendliness rating for Europeans, since one of the primary reasons usually advanced to explain the retention of low-status language varieties is social solidarity with members of one's linguistic group. François Labelle cites the efforts at that time by the Office québécois de la langue française "to impose a French as standard as possible" as one of the reasons for the negative view Quebecers had of their language variety.
Since the 1970s, the official position on Québécois language has shifted dramatically. An oft-cited turning point was the 1977 declaration of the Association québécoise des professeurs de français defining thus the language to be taught in classrooms: "Standard Quebec French [le français standard d'ici, literally, "the Standard French of here"] is the socially favoured variety of French which the majority of Francophone Québécois tend to use in situations of formal communication."
Ostiguy and Tousignant doubt whether Quebecers today would still have the same negative attitudes towards their own variety of French that they did in the 1970s. They argue that negative social attitudes have focused instead on a subset of the characteristics of Quebec French relative to European French, and particularly some traits of informal Quebec French. Some characteristics of European French are even judged negatively when imitated by Quebecers.
Quebec French has some typographical differences from European French. For example, in Quebec French a full non-breaking space is not used before the semicolon, exclamation mark, or question mark. Instead, a thin space (which according to Le Ramat de la typographie normally measures a quarter of an em) is used; this thin space can be omitted in word-processing situations where the thin space is assumed to be unavailable, or when careful typography is not required.
A notable difference in grammar which received considerable attention in France during the 1990s is the feminine form of many professions that traditionally did not have a feminine form. In Quebec, one writes nearly universally une chercheuse or une chercheure "a researcher", whereas in France, un chercheur and, more recently, un chercheur and une chercheuse are used. Feminine forms in -eure as in ingénieure are still strongly criticized in France by institutions like the Académie française, but are commonly used in Canada and Switzerland.
There are other, sporadic spelling differences. For example, the Office québécois de la langue française formerly recommended the spelling tofou for what is in France tofu "tofu". This recommendation was repealed in 2013. In grammar, the adjective inuit "Inuit" is invariable in France but, according to official recommendations in Quebec, has regular feminine and plural forms.
Grammatical differences between informal spoken Quebec French and the formal language abound. Some of these, such as omission of the negative particle ne, are also present in the informal language of speakers of standard European French, while other features, such as use of the interrogative particle -tu, are either peculiar to Quebec or Canadian French or restricted to nonstandard varieties of European French.
While the overwhelming majority of lexical items in Quebec French exist in other dialects of French, many words and expressions are unique to Quebec, much like some are specific to American and British varieties of English. The differences can be classified into the following five categories. The influences on Quebec French from English and Native American can be reflected in any of these five:
The following tables give examples of each of the first four categories, along with the Metropolitan French equivalent and an English gloss. Contextual differences, along with individual explanations, are then discussed.
Examples of lexically specific items:
Examples of semantic differences:
Examples of grammatical differences:
Examples multi-word or fixed expressions unique to Quebec:
Some Quebec French lexical items have the same general meaning in Metropolitan French but are used in different contexts. English translations are given in parentheses.
In addition, Quebec French has its own set of swear words, or sacres, distinct from other varieties of French.
One characteristic of major sociological importance distinguishing Quebec from European French is the relatively greater number of borrowings from English, especially in the informal spoken language, but that notion is often exaggerated. The Québécois have been found to show a stronger aversion to the use of anglicisms in formal contexts than do European francophones, largely because of what the influence of English on their language is held to reveal about the historically superior position of anglophones in Canadian society. According to Cajolet-Laganière and Martel, out of 4,216 "criticized borrowings from English" in Quebec French that they were able to identify, some 93% have "extremely low frequency" and 60% are obsolete. Despite this, the prevalence of anglicisms in Quebec French has often been exaggerated.
Various anglicisms commonly used in European French informal language are mostly not used by Quebec French speakers. While words such as shopping, parking, escalator, ticket, email and week-end are commonly spoken in Europe, Quebec tends to favour French equivalents, namely: magasinage, stationnement, escalier roulant, billet, courriel and fin de semaine, respectively. As such, the perception of exaggerated anglicism use in Quebec French could be attributed, in part, simply to the fact that the anglicisms used are different, and thus more noticeable by European speakers.
French spoken with a large number of anglicisms may be disparagingly termed franglais. According to Chantal Bouchard, "While the language spoken in Quebec did indeed gradually accumulate borrowings from English [between 1850 and 1960], it did not change to such an extent as to justify the extraordinarily negative discourse about it between 1940 and 1960. It is instead in the loss of social position suffered by a large proportion of Francophones since the end of the 19th century that one must seek the principal source of this degrading perception."
Ouaouaron, the Canadian French word for bullfrog, a frog species native to North America, originates from an Iroquois word.
Maringouin, the word for mosquito, also originates from an aboriginal language, Tupi-guarani, spoken by aboriginals on the northern coasts of Brazil. It is thought that early French colonists adopted this word in the late 1600s after exchanges with explorers returning from South America.
Atoca, a synonym for Cranberry, also originates from Iroquois.
The following are areas in which the lexicon of Quebec French is found to be distinct from those of other varieties of French:
Some recent Quebec French lexical innovations have spread, at least partially, to other varieties of French, for example:
On Twitter, supporters of the Quebec separatist party Bloc Québécois used hashtags that align with the syntactic pattern found in hashtags used in French political discourse, rather than adopting the hashtags commonly used by other Canadian parties with similar political positions.
For phonological comparisons of Quebec French, Belgian French, Meridional French, and Metropolitan French, see French phonology.
These examples are intended not exhaustive but illustrate the complex influence that European French has had on Quebec French pronunciation and the range of sociolinguistic statuses that individual phonetic variables can possess.
Like other varieties, Quebec French is characterized by increasingly wide gaps between its formal and informal forms. Notable differences include the generalized use of on (informal for nous), the use of single negations as opposed to double negations: J'ai pas (informal) vs Je n'ai pas (formal) etc. There are increasing differences between the syntax used in spoken Quebec French and that of other regional dialects of French. However, the characteristic differences of Quebec French syntax are not considered standard despite their high-frequency in everyday, relaxed speech.
One far-reaching difference is the weakening of the syntactic role of the specifiers (both verbal and nominal), which results in many syntactic changes:
Other notable syntactic changes in Quebec French include the following:
However, these features are common to all the basilectal varieties of français populaire descended from the 17th century koiné of Paris.
In their syntax and morphology, Quebec French verbs differ very little from the verbs of other regional dialects of French, both formal and informal. The distinctive characteristics of Quebec French verbs are restricted mainly to: