Québec has language laws that prevent businesses from using English in their advertising among other things, and some controversial rulings have come from it. One such ruling was the use of “le week-end”. Québec was punishing businesses who used this term instead of “la fin de semaine”. There was an interview done with an official from the language police where the interviewer had a dictionary from France which showed “le week-end” is proper French. The Québec official said “France doesn’t decide what words are French. We do.”
TIL the French Language Police is a thing
Il y en a deux ! Une pour la France et une pour le Québec mais la majorité des locuteurs du français sont en Afrique.
L’Académie française disagrees
Prescriptivist jerks. Let’s all dress up in $50,000 robes, call ourselves immortals, and pretend that we can control language.
L’académie française deez nuts
Gottem
Gottem
Oh please. There isn’t a single linguist in the Académie Française.
The Académie Française is to the French language what a group of former weathermen is to climatology.
Honnêtement, tu donnes un peu trop de crédibilité à l’Académie française dans ta comparaison.
I’m not finding any info on this. Source?
I tried searching for it before posting but couldn’t find it. It was a radio interview likely sometime in the 80s. It’s hard to find because a search for controversial things the Québec language police have done turns up a lot of results.
Every french speaker is delusional.
I lived in both ‘French Canada’, and France at one point in my life.
In my experience, they all consider themselves the best thing France ever made and the other side are the equivalent of “rednecks”
To be fair, they both can be right.
To be fair if you’re used to “metropolitan” French then some Québécois accents can sound very “redneck”.
Ouiaboos.
I hate you so much. Here, have my upvote.
Baguette Baguette!
Tabarnac
Mother bastard
Make anglo minority in Canada again then we could talk.
Also we could talk to make this project happened.Attend. Pourquoi je dis ça en anglais moi ??
Tu t’es fait retourner le cerveau!
I need conclusive Lemmy anecdata on a key question: is Quebecois French considered antiquated by continental (both European and African) French speakers? Are the differences subtle or not?
It’s not considered antiquated. The Quebecoise’s accent is considered exotic. Their effort to create new French words instead of just taking over the English one is also very cool. E.g: téléverser (download), divulgâcher (spoiler).
Clavarder grace à son butineur
Not antiquated, they just sound a little like hillbillies.
Mon très cher « La manœuvre Picard », bien que je partage absolument votre avis ; je me dois, à mon plus amer regret, de vous informer que vous avez irrémédiablement et royalement fucked up votre carte.
Haut-vote pour l’un des seuls commentaires en français il me semble
C’est quoi le problème avec la carte ?
Présenter que français est parlé dans la majorité du territoire canadien est très loin de la réalité
J’avais pas du tout compris la carte comme ça. Moi, je voyais plutôt une aire de répartition du français.
Dans ce cas, le monde devrait être “flashy-vert”. Parce que les français sont partooouut. Partouuuuuuuut, vous dis-je!!!
Peu importe comment on lit la carte, tu as toujours raison. Tu incarnes bien le génie français !
Ahhhh the French
CUT!
true France is actually Cameroon
I never got this: why do people in France speak an American language instead of a European one?
See, the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur…
And why do they speak mexican in spain?
French-Canadian from Quebec here: the same way an American will use a french word mid sentence to add a certain je-ne-sais-quoi…
But they tend to go way overboard with them, ending with bastardized, barely comprehensible french. And they dare correct us when we use the proper french terms instead of the ones they abuse.
I was watching a video on YouTube today where the person was demonstrating some things and kept going “voila”, but everytime he said it, he didn’t really pronounce the v, so it sounded more like moilah. One step away from moolah (slang for money).
It was bizarre.
I just couldn’t not hear it. I completely forget what the video was about.
I intentionally mispronounce voila as viola. As in the string instrument.
Be careful with this, Viola sounds close to the past perfect of the verb violer, which can mean to break a rule (violer une règle) or worse, to rape
I doubt an English listener would make that mistake, sounds nothing like “violate.”
As-tu bien compris la blague de ton interlocuteur? 😜
I don’t get it. How is French an American language? I don’t understand the meme overall either
French is spoken in France and parts of north America. Most people are very emotional about their native language so they feel every deviation of it is just wrong.
The most common and seemingly natural view is that France French is “right” and oversea French is not but honestly it’s arbitrary. OP turned it around and so I did too, eventhough I myself live in a non French European country. Well, we all hate our neighbors and the enemy is my enemy is my friend I guess.
I once was at a work function where I saw a French-Canadian and a Walloon French (Belgium) mock the French spoken by a Parisian.
C’est normal. Les français aussi le font.
I’ve heard Canadian French is closer to the French France Frenched a few hundred years ago.
I’ve been believing this for a very long time but I’ve seen a video made by a French Canadian that proved me wrong
As a matter of fact, when first immigrants arrived in Nova Scotia, most of the French people weren’t even speaking French, but regional dialects.
What happened is that immigrants had to spend long periods of time in big ports of France before taking the boat to the new World and this is how they learned to speak French.
But English was the language mainly used for trades, and local French speakers included a lot of English words in their daily dictionary (which were then exported to France)
Then England took control of Canada and tried to eradicate the French spoken there because they thought it was impure and perverted.
French speakers were pissed, and began to protect the language with tough anti-English rules
Uh pretty sure protection of French language (and Catholicism) was agreed on from the start. Otherwise there would have been rebellions.
Language, religion, and laws. This is why Quebec is predominantly French, doesn’t use British common law like America and the rest of Canada, and was predominantly catholic at a time when a lot of places required you to follow the king’s (or queen’s) religion.
And why a Catholic school board exists in the entire country. We’re far past the point it should be allowed to exist, but afaik it’s in the constitution and hard to get rid of.
Before the moment England took control of the Canada there wasn’t any protective law because there wasn’t a need to.
Protection measures appeared after that
I’m responding to “tried to eradicate the French spoken there”. When they took over, I’m pretty sure they agreed to the French language and Catholicism from the very beginning. They didn’t try to eradicate it. Protection didn’t come from failed eradication attempts, protection was agreed to from the start.
IIRC that’s correct.
Kinda like how the American accent is closer to OG British English than the current British English pronunciation.
I think it’s souppoused to be spelled prounounciautioun
That’s a false fact. And it’s apparent, since there are dozens of accents in the US as well as umin the UK and there were dozens in the UK 200 years ago. They all developed in their own direction, being sometimes isolated sometimes cross-pollinating with other accents, but none staid the same.
motions hand above head while making airplane noises
*aeroplane
I have a love/hate relationship with the people of Quebec.
It’s mostly hate…
Look at stop signs in France and Quebec, then you know whats up.
Y a pas moyen Djadja
chuis pas ta catin Djadja
Genre, en catchana baby, tu dead çaimbattable.
Solide
Canada is home to the largest French speaking population in the world that has never surrendered to Germany.
I think that is DR Congo. More french speakers than France.
Give Canada some respect, DR Congo didn’t even exist until after WWII.
More French speakers than Quebec, New Brunswick, and a smattering here & there in other provinces? The only other thing the French in this country have is poutine. The least we can do is give them this.
11 million in Canada. 72 million in DR Congo. It’s not even close.
It’s crazy how small people think Africa is, as if it isn’t the 2nd most populous continent with Nigeria on track to overtake the US in population by 2050. Africa is projected to meet the same population as Asia by 2100 (both are likely to separately have about 3-4x the population of every other continent combined)
Of course a country in the most populous section of Africa have more people who speak the national language than in Canada! Nigeria has like 4x the amount of English speakers of Canada, and Uganda & Egypt both have around the same amount as Canada.
La poutine n’est pas française et je vous prierais de surveiller votre ton lorsque vous parlez à mes colocuteurs d’outre-atlantique. Vive le Canada francophone et le Cameroun.
They made up for it by surrendering to the British and having their land sold to the Americans.
I mean, you’re not wrong, but the French in this country have made being a pain in the English-speaking population’s ass their entire raison d’être since like 1760. They’ve been fighting a resistance war for like 264 years which is why I consider it a good roadtrip if I can get from Cornwall to Edmundston without having to stop. Beautiful province but a pain in the dick to even exist in if you’re an Anglo.
I’m an American anglophone that lives in Quebec for work and uh, yeah. These people are constantly fighting a culture war that nobody else gives a shit about or signed up for. There should never be language police.
