Talk:Quebec French/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Royal French and King's Daughters

The accuracy of the following sentence is in doubt: "Quebecois French is also partly rooted in the Royal French spoken at King Louis XIV's Court (see King's Daughters or Filles du Roi)."

It seems to say that the King's Daughers are, or at least spoke, Royal French. Which is not true at all. King's Daughters were commoners and not related to the royalty. The name is merely metaphorical.

I have relocated the "see King's Dauthers" part, but I'm still not sure about if the sentence is true at all. Would somebody confirm? --Menchi 21:17 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

The Filles du Roi spoke the French of Ile-de-France which includes Paris. Royal French was the only official French before 1789. These girls partly explain why there are very little traces of many of France's patois in Quebec. Please Read: http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/francophonie/HISTfrQC_s1_Nlle-France.htm -- Mathieugp

There are a number of phonological archaisms in Québécois French. The one that is most striking --- not apparently touched on in the article, is the pronunciation of the diphthong written "oi," which is realised as /wa/ in standard French and /we/ in Québécois. When king Louis XVIII of France was restored after the final fall of Napoleon, a possibly apocryphal anecdote has Talleyrand telling him to adopt /wa/ rather than /we/, an older pronunciation associated with the aristocracy, so as not to offend his subjects. This is not evidence that aristocrats peopled New France, but it does show that the French of Québéc keeps these older versions. -- Smerdis of Tlön 16:36, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Rolled Rs

I've heard plenty of younger speakers on Quebec TV rolling their Rs. Might this not be rather a regional pronunciation? Intervocalic r seems to be rolled lightly by most Québécois. Jfitzg

Rolled r (better called thrilled r), was indeed the r used traditionaly in the French of France. Read what I wrote just above. Hardouin 18:41, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Dialect

Our language is not a dialect, for sure. Its injurious to call "dialect" our language.Please,do the correction. Un québécois.

I have tried to speak about the Québécois language and mention French-speakers in Belgium as well as France. No doubt some will say this is NPOV, but then they do not know about the history of la langue Québécoise. Alex756 06:27, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

but not only french and belgium speak french. Luxembourg and swiss as well in Europe. And also have their specificities. If you want to compare with european french, you might as well add them. If you want to compare to "original" french, mention France only ihmo. Anthère

Good point Anthère. I don't know that much about the differences. I have mostly changed the FoF term (kind of ugly looking anyway) into French, Parisian French or just French or spoken in France and in one or two places to European French and QF to Québécois. I will leave it to someone else more knowledgeable regarding the regionale differances of European French to deal with these differences. The important point is that Quebecois is a language that has a distinct 500 year history quite apart from France. I am not qualified to discuss the Euorpean francophone differences. Alex756

Move

move

The OLF propounds official standards for written and taught French in Quebec, and is considered more modern and proactive than the Académie française, having proposed, for example, the above francized technical terms which have later become common usage in Quebec, as well as accepted popular changes in usage to reduce sexism. For example, Canadian French uses many feminine job titles (la mairesse, la juge, la docteure) for which official French of France usage has long remained masculine (madame le maire) until the Jospin government decided to feminize the titles against the advice from the Académie française.

end of move

I would like to see a more precise approach of the OLF standards are considered more modern and proactive than the Académie française. Anthère

Franglais

Removed reference to 'franglais' since its Wikipedia article doesn't apply to this situation. Tremblay 00:16, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Issues

• Somehow, the page Québécois French was moved to Québécois language. It should have been moved to Quebec French. In Québec, you will find 9 out of 10 linguists to tell you that there is no Québécois language nowadays (it was different in the 60s and 70s). Maybe two more centuries of British domination would have turned Quebec French into a new Creole of a sort, but it didn't happen. The major education problems of Quebec were mostly solved. Quebec speaks more French than it ever did in the past and the knowledge of our own French and the French of France and elsewhere is higher than before in the academic/scientific world.

French sitoms

Please consider moving this to Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense

Does France have sitcoms at all? Guaka 20:25, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes. France has numerous private TV stations, a public television network and these air numerous shows, some of which would fit the description of a "sitcom". The TV station we get from France here in Quebec is TV5, which is an international French language station. It has mostly European contents, most of which is centered on France. With satelite, we also get to catch other stations. Mathieugp 05:29, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, and I may even go as far as to say, "unfortunately". David.Monniaux 21:32, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hahaha. :P --Liberlogos 00:59, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Please read on the Trésor de la langue française au Québec project here --> http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/

I found a little something on it in English here --> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/auger/aug_res.htm

• The are laws in Quebec requiring for the dubbing of movies to be done in Quebec in international French. Therefore the recently added comment about most movies being dubbed in France in innaccurate. The majority of foreign movies are dubbed locally. Mathieugp 02:40, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I agree: the moving of the article to Québécois language was completely misguided. As you say, it should be moved to Quebec French, and the mention of "Québécois language" in the first paragraph should be deleted. The person who moved the article also didn't update the redirects, so now there are many broken links.--Indefatigable 16:34, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I don't feel any of this adequately explains why this was moved to Quebec French. What was wrong with Québécois French, which is how I've usually heard this dialect referred to? And I wish whoever moved it would fix the links.- Montrealais

The English-speaking world outside of Canada is not familiar with the adjective "Québécois", and this is the audience for the English version of Wikipedia.

Yes. Outside Canada, the word Québécois, especially with the accents on, is not in use. The most accurate translation of français québécois is Quebec French. Mathieugp 23:34, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Quebec French lexicon

How about we move the huge lexicon section to its own article? Would Quebec French lexicon be a good choice? Are there examples to follow in Wikipedia or would we be pioneers? -- Mathieugp 12:27, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Yes, this is an excellent idea, dont acte. Both the new and the old articles need lots of work by the way—I'll invest some in the next few weeks, promis. --Valmi 23:21, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

---

Unicode and API

I changed some notations to make them "true" API, but I'm afraid that it may be awful on older computers. I'm concerned specially about the diphtongue notations, they were totally wrong and had to be fixed, but this "double-short diacritic" I was said is hard to render properly. Inputs? --Valmi 02:35, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

---

Dubious, you say...?

Say, why is this article under the Dubious Category? --Liberlogos 00:58, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The R bit is dubious – "dubious" means one information is "contested"; I am actually marking my own edit that way, see previous subtitle and User_talk:Gilgamesh#Non-uvular_R.27s_in_Quebec. --Valmi 04:56, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

IPA vs. X-SAMPA

I just noticed that the Phonetics section is all IPA and the Grammar one all X-SAMPA. We should choose once and for all. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 01:05, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I am not aware of any wikipedia-wide consensus on the question. I tend toward X-Sampa if only because I have yet to see a version of Internet Explorer Actually able to display IPA (and Unicode in general) correctly, AT LEAST in pages that specify unicode encoding!

Also, I must point out the default encoding of Wikipedia is Iso-8859-1, NOT unicode and thus in truely strict display, IPA characters would not shopw up (and cannot at all if the browser does not suppoert unicode-encoding).

Finally, if it is not easily readable by linguist, it will at least be guaranteed to show up correctly.--Circeus 15:15, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well well, I asked before on this very talk page is everybody was able to read the IPA properly, and nobody answered, and I realise just now that you are right and even I with IE am not able to read it. Bugger...

As of wikiconsensus, you are right in not being aware of one because there is none. As of what a truely strict display would do, you are wrong because HTML entities always use ISO-10646 (~= Unicode) independantly of the page encoding. But of course if Internet Explorer, still used by about 90% people out there, won't show any of it, there is little point...

So I'd tend to agree with Circeus and use X-SAMPA then, because of IE. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 16:32, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

...But I'd love to hear others' opinion. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 01:51, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why limit this to the sole Quebec French article? It is an issue that must be tackled over Wikipedia as a whole IMHO--Circeus 14:12, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, but no, but it's been tackled already quite a bit in the WPT namespace with no concesus reached. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (pronunciation) and Wikipedia talk:Pronunciation guide. A MediaWiki upgrade was even mentionned, which is an idea I'm tackling right now in my own mind...

On the other hand, different contents have different needs. Even in Quebec French, you could say that SAMPA is more appropriate than IPA for the Grammar section, but I was thinking of the conversion of Phonetics to X-SAMPA and it's a nightmare. Example: <municipalité> [mY_0nI_0sI_0palI_0te]. Le réviseur linguistique en moi s'indigue néanmoins lorsqu'il voit deux normes différentes dans un article. --[[User:Valmi|Valmi ✒]] 20:57, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

pronunciation samples

The section describing pronunciation is prety techincal. It would be extremely nice to have contrasting pronunciations of a word or two (perhaps petit). --Andrew 03:52, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

Very good also is a comparison between the pronunciations of the 7 days of the week. We hear Quebecers (often without them truly realizing it) pronounce lundzi, mardzi, mercredzi, jeudzi, vendredzi, samedzi while the French (most of them at least) will not do the linking "zzz" sound between the "d" and the "i". (Sorry, I have no idea how to use IPA. You can fix my sentence if you want. :-) -- Mathieugp 03:06, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

can`t help about the way to write it but this what is called "affricative". People from the gaspesie region seem to have a much milder case of it maybe due to the acadian influence.--Marc pasquin 00:54, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

I wrote most of this section a long time ago, and I'll take the fact that almost nobody touched it since then--even though it seriously needs better vulgarisation--as the ultimate proof that it's impossible to understand. Myself, not being so immersed in the subject anymore (in fact I'm not even using the French language on a daily basis nowadays), I'm suddenly finding it very heavy.

Whenever I have some time and energy for it, I'll totally rewrite it in a way that normal people can make some sense of without getting a headache. --Valmi ✒ 05:13, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Interintelligibility

In my own humble personal experience, as a French person:

• Fast, colloquial Québec French can be difficult or impossible to understand (e.g. Lynda Lemay when she gives her "Québécois lessons").
• In normal situations, while the Québecois accent is easily recognizable, there is no problem understanding Québécois speaking. David.Monniaux 18:31, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have a question. If the discussion page is not an appropriate page for the question, apologies. Could someone add a section to the page on the adoption of (American) English phrases in Quebec French? I live in Montreal and my French isn't good enough to tell whether this is true, but I was at a party several months ago where a number of academics from Belgium were making fun of the claim that Quebec French is "less English" and "more pure" than European French. They weren't being mean and they weren't suggesting that Quebec French is inferior. But they said, basically, if you're fluent in English it's much much easier to understand Quebec French due to the adoption of wholesale phrases from American English. Actually it's not just that. It's the use of verbs in ways that match their English counterparts. Examples: Ca fait du sense. Je sympathise avec toi. The Belgians had a long and very funny list of these but I can't remember them. I think it is interesting from a linguistic viewpoint to look at what (in terms of language "purity") can be controlled by force of will and force of law. It seems that noun substitutions can be controlled to a point, but I'm wondering how Quebec, surrounded by, what, 250 million? anglophones can keep hold of a version of French that is less anglisized than European French. MySamoanAttorney 08:15, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

They can, and they do, precisely because they're surrounded by 310 million Anglophones. It leads to a siege atmosphere which allows them to do almost anything, including pass questionable laws (see Bill 101), to prevent the encroachment of English into their language. France has no such reason to worry about Spanish, German or English, so France borrows occasional words and constructions, and is none the worse for it.

Bill 101 provided, for some time, that commercial signage MUST be in French. Lawmakers also concerned themselves with making up new French words to replace English borrowings like "hot dog" (chien chaud). Joni Mitchell said "You don't know what you've got till it's gone", but the Québecois have been determined since 1977 to make sure they keep it instead.

Both Quebec French and European French have anglicisms, but different ones (there are many cases where Quebec French uses a French word while European French has borrowed an English word, and there are many other cases where Quebec French borrows an English word where European French uses a French word). Neither one is more "pure" than the other. The difference is that Quebec French has absorbed English vocabulary as a gradual process through 250 years of contact with English-speaking populations within Quebec, while European French with very few exceptions (spleen, clown, etc) did not borrow much from English at all until very recent decades when it became faddish and fashionable to use English words as slang. -- Curps 23:32, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Curps is correct too. In summary then, France has anglicisms from the late 20th century on, but few from before that. Quebec has anglicisms (and nativisms) from the 17th century until the late 20th century, and then they stopped (mostly) taking in more. Steve Rapaport 12:30, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

French is my second language, and I have little difficulty understanding either Québécois or European French as long as it's not too fast or too full of colloquialisms, but this may be because I was taught by European French speakers while living near Quebec. Anyhow, that's not why I'm making this comment. I wanted to bring up two seemingly contradictory statements in the section about interintelligibility with other dialects. It says "European pronunciation is not at all difficult for Canadians to understand; only slang expressions present any problems". Then in the very next sentence it says "Television programmes and films from Quebec often must be subtitled for international audiences, which some Quebecers perceive as offensive, although they themselves sometimes can hardly understand European French pronunciation and slang." I don't feel I'm qualified to make a judgment on this issue, not being a native French speaker myself, but at least one of these sentences needs to be changed. — Ливай | ☺ 21:56, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think it would be fair to say that *standard* european pronunciation (as the one you would see on the french news) is perfectly understandable for most of us but slang (like parisian argot) isn't, not at all in some cases (a few movie characters seemed to be speaking a foreign language to my ear). Then of course there is the problem of regional accent which can be quite hard in both cases if they are particularly thick (saguenayen accent to a parisian or marseillais to a québecois.)--Marc pasquin 02:49, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

The accent of quebec may be hard to understand for someone who's not accustomed , like the accent from the south of France. It is just a question of practice. But the difference of southern french and québécois is that the metropolitans hear southern french quite often in films, ads, etc. and so we all can easily understand what they say, without subtitles. The subtitles when a québécois speaks in french television is for people who have never heard quebecois spoken before --80.11.154.154 17:05, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Article is NOT correct about relative Interintelligibility between French and English. I am a Canadian anglo who has lived in Montreal French for over 60 years, has family in England and who has also lived or visited for lengthy periods in France,Belgium, Switzerland, Africa etc. I have two points to make about the article (and some of the discussion):

==1 - the range of difficulty between different groups of English speakers is significantly wider than amongst Francophones; but

==2 - the English-speakers don't worry about it whereas Francophones make an issue of it.

==1. Quebecers, even those with working-class accents, can be immediately understood in Europe when they speak carefully. And Europeans can always be understood in Quebec, because of exposure to French radio, TV and films, but also because it is the "posh" language of native Quebecers, used in the Canadian media, and any where else where some pretentiousness is desired.I have seen Quebec hockey players (not noted for cultural sophistication) get on perfectly in Switzerland and France with vitually no learning curve.The same applies in French Africa.

HOWEVER, I have also been in work groups made up of US, British, Australian and Anglo-African mid-level managers. After a year together, our Australian and our US Southerner were not able to have a fully comprehensible discussion with each other. In our travels, Scottish security guards and taxi drivers were incomprehensible to most of the group. While African managers were able to speak very comprehensible English, labourers were incomprehensible (unlike French-speaking Africa where the fractured French of labourers was nevertheless immediately understandable, albeit amusing.) Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers in Toronto are often not understandable, whereas Haitian taxi drivers in Montreal have no language barrier in French, despite the obvious accent. (Language schools such as Berlitz have felt the need to teach spoken "American" as a different language from English; this does not occur in French, not even in Quebec where such an idea would be a source of amusement. As well, courses are now offered in the Southern states of the US to social climbers seeking to get rid of the regional accent. "My Fair Lady" is a G Bernard Shaw story about teaching a working-class English girl to speak "posh". I am unaware of such an approach in the French-speaking world.

2 - The Francophone world is traumitized by the need to conform. On language matters there is l'Académie française and Quebec's Office nationale de la langue française. Differences in language do not hinder understanding. But the degree of adherence to the norm is an indicator of class and education much more than in English. Some Canadian Francophones prefer to make their career in English where an accent is irrelevant, rather than in French where their birth-place and level of education becomes obvious the minute they open their mouth. Quebecers feel snubbed in France but treat Acadians with even greater disdain. North-Africans in Paris are chased away from employment centres the minute they say an accented word - but a "pure" African like President Senghor wins universal admiration in France because he masters the official version of French.

IN the ENGLISH world, Prince Phillip correctly said that "bad English is the international language." The only criterion is understandability. Anglophones never think of language as an issue of conformity to a norm. Indeed its dictionaries seek to record usage rather than to dictate rules. Thus the wide variety of spoken English is simply not an issue in the English-speaking world. However, amongst Francophones it is a source of disbute.... perhaps because they understand each other sufficiently well to be mutually insulting.

The author(s) of the text would be well advised to take another run at this issue.

I completely agree with you on most of the points and elaborations thereon, however, I prefer to simply say that the sections on standardization and on intelligibility not only consist of bunk but also play into myths and other preconceived notions. I did a major overhaul of the entire article EXCEPT for those sections because they were hopeless, no offense to their authors. They seem more like personal accounts on a discussion-talk page than decent article material.

I've avoided reworking this section because 1. the two headings need to be removed entirely (which will surely shock some folks), 2. for lack of other contributions, I could bring in personal research on language sociology, 3. I am hesitant to introduce some upsetting news to the French-language speech communities both in France and Québec (statistics on functional literacy, class issues, language awareness, etc., and 4. I got busy in the meantime. À vous de jouer... CJ Withers (sorry, the tildes and markup don't on the computer I'm currently using)

Oïl languages

It has been proposed that Languages of Oïl be renamed and moved to Langues d'Oïl. Comments and votes on Talk:Languages of Oïl, please, if you're interested. Man vyi 09:23, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

On the Quebec French norm

For those interested in the subject, there is currently a very interesting series of two articles by Marie-Éva de Villers (author of the Multidictionnaire de la langue française) in Le Devoir. The articles present the results of a study which tried to establish the real norm of Quebec French by comparing all the words used in newspaper articles published in Le Devoir and Le Monde for the year 1997. The second and last article was published today (January 5, 2005). Very interesting read. -- Mathieugp 22:17, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

On the Quebec french "ear" and "mouth"

I'd love to note somewhere the obvious difference between the location in the mouth of Quebec French vs. France French, and the related difference in how a Quebecois hears foreign sounds. Unfortunately I'm not really qualified to do this in detail. All I know is that the foreign "th" sounds come out very different in the different French accents when speaking English:

sound	English	Quebec	France
[θ]	"think"	"tink"	"sink"
[ð]	"this"	"dis"	"zis"

Obviously the two languages are either differently placed in the mouth, or have a different "ear" for consonants, or both. Anyone understand the linguistic terminology here well enough to comment on this?

Steverapaport 20:20, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

While the fact has been widely aknowledged (I've seen numerous references to it), I have yet to see a suggested hypothesis. Maybe Quebecois are more exposed to English slang /t, d/ for [θ, ð] than European French speakers? --Circeus 20:42, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

First, my qualifications to comment: I lived in Ottawa (near the Quebec border) for a year, and in Northern Quebec for a summer. I've also spent a bit of time in France and in other parts of Europe where I have had business dealings with Frenchmen. In English and in Parisian French, which I studied for 7 years.

The difference is definitely not due to slang English influence, because in the remote parts of Quebec there isn't any to speak of. It is rather due to an entire way of speaking. To my ear the Quebecois speak a version of French that is spoken further back in the mouth -- their "R"s retreat almost to the uvula, the mouth is held further open, and the words alternate between sounding swallowed and sounding flat. The articulation points are further back on the tongue. There's also a bit of an adenoidal sound, as if the speaker has a cold.

The Parisiens speak closer to the front of the mouth, with more closed mouth, and most of the articulation done near the tip of the tongue and lips. I'd love to say all this with authority but all I have is my own eyes and ears for this.

I'm pretty sure that the difference in the "th" sounds is related to the different articulation points or the adenoidal thing, but I don't have much to back it up. But I'd love to hear from someone who does! Steverapaport 23:37, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wow! This whole discussion is really interesting and important, so here's my (socio)linguistic grain of salt. As for the "mouth", in linguistics we call that "place of articulation"; "ear" would refer to "phonological framework". In order to understand "phonological framework", you can think of a matrix or a screen into which English-language sounds are categorized or slotted by FQ's. Naturally, the "sink"/"tink" versions of "think" show that Francophone Quebeckers have a different phonological framework in their heads than other Francophones do and vice versa. For example, Brazilians consistently pronounce "th" as f/v. Among FQ's, this difference exists despite spelling pronunciations, i.e. pronouncing what one sees; the proof of this is the "d" for voiced "th". A so-called "exposure" to English "slang" [sic] has nothing to do with this phenomenon among FQ's (or Francophone Ontarians, for that matter). The phenomenon is present particularly among unilingual francophones who have never been in contact with English, even before seeing written English or English borrowings.

However, there is someone who asserts that FQ's produce "sink" instead of "tink". She's an English instructor who was working at UQAM when I was there. I can't remember her name. Anyway, I have a hard time believing such an assertion because it's very clear that FQ's perceive both "th"'s as explosions, not vibrations. A study would use nonce words (made up, yet plausible-sounding English words); however, they would need to be read by an English speaker and repeated by the FQ.

As for what the FQ phonological framework consists of, there was an article written by Denis Dumas a few years back. I don't remember the exact title/date, though you should be able to find the info easily on line.

Btw, sorry for my laziness of not using IPA. CJ Withers 03:14, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm... As a french speaker who already noticed this, I'd be tempted to say it's because the french are specifically taught to use those "s" and "z" sounds instead of the "th" sound that doesn't exist in french, while us Quebecers who are a bit more accustomed to english are taught the "correct" way to pronounce the "th" sound as best as we can, but since the "th" sound is very unnatural for french speakers, we mangle it into the resulting "de", "dis" and "tink"... Am I making sense? :) Etienne D. 16:39, 02 February 2007

Iles-de-la-Madelaine french

First, I'm no linguist, and not an excellent english speaker (and writer). I'm a French-Canadian from montreal, and I worked for a long time on Québec's lower-north shore. The accent there is sometimes incredibly hard to understand, being a mix of Acadian (Shiac), Quebec and Iles-de-la-Madelaine (Madelinot) french. One caracteristic of the language, is they omit the letter "r" in all their words. Someone told me it's because when the english deported the Acadians, some of them moved to Iles-de-la-Madelaine, and rejected the King (le Roi)and the queen (la Reine)of France that abandonned them. To be sure that no one ever spoke of the Roi (and Reine)again, they deliberatly stopped using the letter R. Thats why it's easy to spot a Madelinot on mainland Quebec. He says: Déba'que instead of Débarque, Pou'quoi instead of Pourquoi and so on. On some occasions, they use some kind of hard H, instead of R, like in h'gahde instead of Regarde. Someone can confirm or infirm that story?

The "r" drop, i.e. lack of rhoticity, is due to Acadian French. Most varieties of French in Canada fall into one of the two categories: Quebec or Acadian. Of course, there are some other slight differences, yet they should not necessary be considered justification for the "dialect" title. CJ Withers 02:52, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Non-standard Pronouns

Shouldn't there be a reference in the grammar section to the (familiar) use of non-standard personal pronouns in Québec French, e.g. (quoting from the French version of the article) A m'énerve, Y sont fous, or È sont foulles ? 161.24.19.82 18:27, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

There is info on that, but the entire repertoire of pronouns needs to be redone (check my sandboxes) because in some cases it's use, phonology or semantics. For example "y" for "ils" is not Québec French, it's all spoken French dialects. This phenomenon is due to "l" being unstable. Anyway, as I said, I'm working on a coherent presentation of the pronouns. CJ Withers 19:08, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

All three, A, Y, and È, are due to unstable L. Nothing to do with grammar. --Valmi--quite unable to find a tild on the Argentine keyboard.

Exactly. Check my sandbox on User:CJ Withers/Quebec French (syntax). CJ Withers 17:29, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Anglophone Emigration

Need something on Anglophone emigration from modern Quebec affecting language balance.

Could you sign your comment please? :-)

This article is about the regional variety of French called Quebec French, not about language demographics for French and English in Québec. There are two articles, French in Canada and Language demographics of Quebec that are appropriate places for the info you mention. CJ Withers 04:33, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

English Influence?

In PRONOUNS - "this is one of the very few possible influences of English on Quebec French aside from vocabulary".

A section summarizing these non-lexical influences would be useful.

Wondering: are the slack [ɪ], [ʏ], [ʊ] from some regional dialect of France, and not English?

Could you sign your comment, please? :-)

The lax, not "slack" (connotation!!), vowels are phonologically conditioned and do not come from English. This lax/tense pairing is also seen in German and Swedish. There is a detailed discription of the phenomenon in Denis Dumas' book Nos façons de parler : les prononciations en français québécois, which should already be cited at the bottom of the main article, but isn't. Anyway, the main article for Quebec French is way too long as it is. Should it be truly needed, an explanation of the lax/tense phenomenon would go in the Quebec French pronunciation article, which, by the way, needs a major overhaul. CJ Withers 04:33, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

History

I don't understand clearly this sentence:

Such early yet difficult success was followed by a socio-cultural retreat, if not repression, that would later help preserve French in Canada.

What do "socio-cultural retreat" mean? Is this talking about the bill 101? If yes I can't believe someone think we retreated from the american or canadian culture so easily. Before about 1890, the french canadians were forming the majority in all Canada. Before that we were even more, more than 95% in 1760. How can we "retreat", I don't understand.207.253.108.186 00:20, 16 March 2007 (UTC)Fred.

Renaming article French Language in Quebec (lingusitics) / Moving Quebec and Canadian French to disambiguation page

This article refers to a dialect of French that is called "Canadian French" elsewhere in Canada and in most areas of Quebec. Many authoritative sources refer to it as Canadian French. Choosing Quebec French over Canadian French (or vice versa) is POV. Both Canadian French and Quebec French should point to a common disambiguation page explaining the controversy. It would also be consistent with naming convention of Canadian French to French language in Canada. Also, this is mostly an article on linguistics, and doesn't dicsuss the political and demographic aspects of the language. --Soulscanner 20:14, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Here are some easily verifiable online references that, among other things, distinguish between Acadian and Canadian French. All refer to Canadian French for what is refered to exclusively as Quebec French on this page. [1][2][3][4])--Soulscanner 02:11, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

• Support --Soulscanner
• Oppose. There are two main dialects of French in Canada: Quebec and Acadian French. This is the main article on the former. It shouldn't discuss politics or demographics of French language in Quebec, because it's about what Quebec French is as a regional dialect distinct from metropolitan/international French. There are other articles addressing the language politics and demographics of Quebec. To rename this article "French Language in Quebec (linguistics)" would be dismissing the nature and importance of Quebec French. I would also like to point out, as an example, that there are seperate articles for Cajun French and French in the United States. The former discusses a dialect of French particular to Louisiana, the latter the demographics and history of French usage (as opposed to history of the language itself; its evolution) in the US.--Boffob 23:25, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
  • The article discusses political aspects of French in Quebec in the history section. Canadian French is referred to primarily as Canadian French outside Quebec. To choose Quebec French is to introduce a Quebec POV to the article. It in no way negates that it is spoken in Quebec, but acknowledgers that it is the same dialect spoken in most of Canada. The idea here is to find a way of lending equal weight to both names as both are in common use. --Soulscanner 02:32, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
    • OK, let me rephrase. This article shouldn't discuss language politics of Quebec (that's a pretty big can of worms), but should mention how political aspects influenced the evolution of the dialect in the history section. Second, as this article is still about the dialect, there is no reason to call it "French language in Quebec (linguistics)". At most, your argument is to move it to "Canadian French" but then you do get issues about Acadian French (also a canadian dialect), and the change of identification since the Quiet Revolution (Quebec Francophones abandoning the "usurped" canadian qualifier for a Quebec identity). But there's already a sizeable Canadian French article explaining all this. So I don't see the point to change the status quo.--Boffob 06:03, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Some discussion of historical/social aspects is relevant to provide context, though in-depth coverage could certainly be provided elsewhere. Joeldl 03:31, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose. The name might indeed be confusing but I think the first two paragraphs explain pretty well that it's spoken outside of Quebec. I don't think it's a POV, it's just how it's called (to be distinguished from Acadian French, as mentioned above). I also agree this article shouldn't be about politics of demographics themselves. Saintamh 12:59, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

The Explanation for why the equally common name "Canadian French" is used is subjective and POV. Many learned people use Canadian French to describe this dialect, as the references above clearly show. --Soulscanner 02:32, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose Quebec French is a variety of French. This article is about that variety. The nominator has expressed, on previous occasions, a preference for the name Canadian French over Quebec French. This issue will have to be dealt with head-on, and this move request seems like an attempt to sidestep that debate. The debate will have to take into account the slightly differing meanings of Quebec French and Canadian French, while recognizing that full articles on each that acted as if the other didn't exist would probably have 90% overlap. Also, the move debate at Talk:Canadian French isn't over. Joeldl 03:31, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose I went over the four "easily verifiable online references" that Soulscanner provides in order to support his position. The first reference is a 1984 document, whose overwhelming references date before 1975, at a time when the use of "Quebec French" was still not in use among the scholars. Wikipedia is a 2007 on-line reference, and the overwhelming majority of the newest articles on this topic clearly distingues between "Quebec French" and the other forms of "Canadian French" spoken in Canada. Indeed, the third reference provided by Soulscanner clearly supports this latter view. The third reference lists a dozen of titles most of them about French spoken in Canada. The first title of this list is: A comparison of 19th and 20th century spoken Quebec French. Another title is even more revealing: "Le français canadien parlé hors Québec: aperçu sociolinguistique". Other titles refer to "question formation in Québec", to "the Récits du français québécois", and to the "temporal reference system in Quebec French". (Please note that all the preceding titles are post-1975). Two titles refer to the French spoken in the Ottawa region, which in itself suggests that it might be a French with a distinct accent compared to the one spoken in Quebec. Only a few titles refer specifically to the Canadian French. The second reference is a list of classes available at University of Calgary. Needless to say, the value of this reference is none. Only the last reference is of some value in backing up Soulscanner's point, but even then, the author says that "there are differences between Acadian French and Canadian French". To the extent that Acadian French are Canadians and speak one form of "Canadian French", we should be able to replace "Acadian French" by "one form of Canadian French", but the sentence does not make sense anymore ("there are differences between one form of Canadian French and Canadian French"). The logic is preserved, however, if we say that there exists different forms of "Canadian French", of which "Acadian French" and "Quebec French" are two varities. This is exactly the position advocated by Wikipedia. Marcus wilby73 01:32, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose Unfortunately, I didn't see this in 2007 because I would have opposed the proposition. In the meantime, the question has bee settled and Canadian French confirmed as an umbrella term for all the different varieties of French in Canada.

Marcus wilby73 08:09, 1 May 2007 (UTC)