Trying to understand Québécois French

[mmcirvin]

Québécois French is frustrating Maciej Ceglowski. I can sympathize, though intellectually I realize that it's not the language's fault.

For reasons of geography, I've spent far more time in Québec than in any other place whose primary language is not English. So my school training in French actually comes in handy... except that, like Maciej, I learned the wrong version of the language, and Québécois is still frequently baffling to me. It's sort of like the difference between, say, Scottish and Texan English. As a non-native speaker, it's been a little harder for me to "get accustomed" than it probably is for native French speakers.

I remember one time I was at the Montréal jazz festival and suddenly realized that there was one French-speaking group that I could mysteriously understand when they introduced themselves; it turned out that they were from Paris, and I think Tom Dignan, who is much more fluent than I am, overheard some people in the crowd making fun of their crazy accents. (Of course, when I was actually in Paris I didn't have much more success, because the people there talk at like a thousand words a minute and use lots of abbreviations, verlan and other slang. I have the most luck with people who are trying to speak very clearly, such as broadcast announcers and people introducing bands.)

Some consonants and vowels in Québécois sound to me more like the way they do in American or Canadian English than the way I was taught they were supposed to sound in French. So sometimes I end up doing this mental flip in which I imagine an English speaker reading words out loud, and that clears up some difficulties. (Native speakers of the language would probably be insulted to read that, so I stress that I'm not claiming they're pronouncing their own language incorrectly or in an Anglicized manner. It's just what I hear in my own head. And it probably has as much to do with English's borrowings from old Norman French as with anything else.)

...And, yeah, dépanneur completely threw me the first twenty times, too.

Comments

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

I am pretty good these days at understanding Lebanese arabic, but the new boss is an Egyptian, and I am back basically to square one when he wants to talk to me in Arabic. Which is unfortunate, because his English leaves something to be desired.