Richard Flynn :: no comment

As I learnt whenever it was we first came across the word and concept of francophonie in French classes at Gilling, they speak French in Canada. In France, meanwhile, they make fun of the French-Canadians for their accent and curious turns of expression. How exciting for me, therefore, to arrive in Quebec (the city), the capital of Quebec (the province) and be thrown into an almost-entirely francophone society. I have been amused and surprised by some of the the French I have heard so far, and what follows are a few brief observations based on my own experiences—they shouldn’t necessarily be taken to be indicative of the way everyone speaks French in Canada.

First, that hilarious pronunciation, of which the French make so much fun. At Mass on Sunday the girl singing the Gloria managed to make the word gloire rhyme with père.¹ In fact many speakers’ vowels have been shifted so far from the pronunciation in the Hexagon that I really have to stop and listen hard in order to be able to understand what they are saying.

There is also a tendency to hyper-nasalize French nasal vowels, which also shifts the individual vowels’ position. For example, the word pain (bread) is hyper-nasalized to be pronounced more like [paeeeng].² Similarly, as I write this on the train from Quebec to Montreal, the woman behind me is on her mobile phone making arrangements for a taxi to meet the train, which she pronounces [traeeeng]. These vowels are often nasalized to such an extent that that final [g] becomes really audible.

However, not everyone I’ve met speaks with such a strong Canadian accent, in the same way that not everyone in the U.S. speaks with a southern twang or a New Jersey whine.³ (Or, indeed, that not everyone in Australia speaks with a rough-as-guts fair-dinkum accént.) I have come across several people who have evidently been brought up speaking in the French-French fashion. Those are the ones, of course, whom I have the least difficulty understanding.

I’ve also been struck by the way people use the various phrases of greeting. I think that in fact there is a general confusion about the correct formula to use at a given moment, or at least a far greater elasticity of what is permitted/expected. On my first evening I went to a very pleasant Breton restaurant: I arrived and the waitress (in traditional clothing, including the funky lace bonnet) called to me across the restaurant, ‘Bonjour!’ I checked outside, it was still dark; I responded (out of habit), ‘Bon soir!’ When she came over to my table with the menu, again she said, ‘Bonjour.’ Weird. Meanwhile, in Geneva I got particularly accustomed to the departure-formula, ‘Bonne journée’ or ‘Bonne soirée’.⁴ In Switzerland the use of the departure-formula became so ingrained in me that when I returned to English-speaking lands I really had to fight the urge to say ‘Have a nice day’ when taking my leave. Here, however, it seems to be far less commonly used, and when it is used at all it is not so rigorous. I have said ‘bonne journée’ to people and have just had ‘Merci’ in response, or, even worse, silence. Meanwhile, I have also heard lots of people just using the greeting-formula at the moment of departure, hence one waiter saying ‘bon soir’ to me as I left the restaurant.

One other point of confusion was the meaning of the word déjeuner. You learn in about lesson two, of course, that déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Quebec they use it to mean ‘breakfast’. Déjeuner is of course a literal translation of breakfast (and/or vice-versa)—jeûner is ‘to fast’. Indeed, the introduction to the Wikipédia article on the subject suggests that déjeuner meaning breakfast was universal until the nineteenth century, at which point petit-déjeuner began to gain currency, ‘spécialement en France’.

I always learned that the response to ‘Merci’ is ‘Je vous en prie’, or, less formally, ‘De rien’. What I have occasionally heard here, though, is ‘Bienvenue’. Evidently this is a direct translation of the English ‘[you’re] welcome’. Thinking about it, the English phrase makes relatively little sense (there is an argument for saying that it’s an abbreviation of something along the lines of ‘you’re welcome to the act of kindness which I have just performed for you.’), but in French, to my ear, ‘Bienvenue’ is even more nonsensical. And thus hilarious.

Nowhere have I seen the standard word boisson. In its stead the universal word is breuvage, which I suspect is used since it sounds like the English ‘beverage’. I obviously haven’t got access to my massed ranks of dictionaries here, but when I looked up breuvage on wordreference.com it was suggested that the word is only ‘littéraire, humoristique’. As you might expect, a list of words with peculiar Quebecker usage is available—where else?—on Wikipédia.

However, there are some things which you might expect to change, but which have been kept very much in the French fashion. Compound numerals are used as in France, so seventy is soixante-dix, and ninety is quatre-vingt-dix. In Geneva—as, I believe, in Belgium—you hear septante (with the [p] pronounced) and nonante, and further east in Romandy (certainly by the time you reach Lausanne) people say huitante for eighty. When I was in Saint-Boniface, a French-speaking place which used to be a separate city but is now incorporated into the city of Winnipeg,⁵, I asked the girl at the museum about the non-compound numbers: on her face she portrayed a mixed look of confusion (having never heard of septante or nonante) and disgust (because, she seemed to reason, that is a ridiculous way to count or to speak). Another Francism which is maintained is the orthographic convention of writing the unit of currency after the price: so, for example, not ‘$4.40’, but ‘4,40 $’.