Friday, 3 February 2017

Le français: on le parle icitte lè

 Tsé, à Québec y parlent français et c’est correct…

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.)

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