Obviously a three-week stay in the peaceful
Canadian province of Québec doesn’t bring you close to mastering Canadian
French pantout, and I had a little de la misère with communication. But I had le fun! French
Canada is a corner of the globe that truly sweeps you off your feet: both
culturally and linguistically. Le Québec,
c’est pas pire!
You may be thinking, ‘Why bother learning
Canadian French’? Welcome to the pathway
of a French teacher-in-training. Understanding
Canadian French, or le Québecois, means
I can teach students about the diverse Francophone world, and truly understand
the extent of French linguistic diversity for myself. How fabulous that a small
Canadian region, having been conquered by the English over 200 years ago, has
managed to preserve such a strong cultural identity and now boasts French as an
official language of Canada.
So, what was my personal experience in
Québec?
Image you were a foreigner
learning English: French-born perhaps, fluent in British or American English,
and one day you decide to pack your bags for Australia. On arrival, the accent is
foreign, you hear fresh slang and strange expressions, and you feel particularly
pompous with your ‘mother country’ adopted accent.
That parallel experience conjures the image my
initial shock in Québec! After a few days I started to work out some
general accent rules, such as when a word contains the accent circonflexe you hear a diphthong (two-vowels in the one
syllable). For example, la fête is
pronounced la faite. You also
hear some Québec dialects with the rhotic /r/, as found in most Canadian
English dialects, however the sound can appear in unexpected places such as the
‘x’ in je peux. Additionally, the Québecois are more devoted
to referencing religion in everyday expressions rather than attending Church,
with tabarnak this, and sacré that, but you rather infrequently
hear swearing (the contrary of France!).
The Québecois are also quickly proud to state
that they don’t use Anglicism’s such as le
parking or le shopping as the
French do, but you will hear c’est le fun and c’est cute in nearly every conversation. Their syntax can also be surprising
Anglophone with common phrases such as vous
allez bien? instead of comment-allez
vous? and manger ici instead of manger sur place. ‘Hello’ and ‘bye’ are
your colloquial greetings, and daily food times reflect Anglo-Canadian culture
with le déjeuner (break-fast), then le lunch (or le dîner), followed
by la souper (supper).
The food in Québec was much more Canadian
fast food-influenced than I was expecting with dishes such as la poutine (fries with cheese curd). As
a local cuisine, I was directed to foods I knew from home, such as le pâté chinois (similar to Shephard’s
Pie) and la tourtière (spin on meat
loaf). What the cuisine beautifully demonstrates is the immense migrant history
of Québec and the reason why the province is so welcoming to refugees and
newcomers. Food stores and products might also confuse you as Québec law enforces
that all products sold in their province must be labeled in French. Hence why
you go for a coffee at Café Starbucks, eat
some deep-fried chicken at PFK (Poulet
Frit Kentucky), and shop for groceries at Coûtco
de gros.
Québec is like your star student: it embraces
new ideas, but is equally headstrong and resilient. It contains all the
beautiful landscapes and warm-spirited Canadians that you associate with Canada,
and speaks of the world through bilingual competency.
If you didn’t have a reason to visit Québec
and learn some Québecois before, you do now.
(I went to Québec city in July 2016 for a French teachers course, then spent a few days in Montréal. From there, I spent a week in Toronto for the AIM French Summer Institute.)
