French Around the World: #1 Quebec and New Brunskwick speech
Who speaks French ?
French is a lively worldwide language. It is the main language other than English to be spoken on every one of the five mainlands. Truth be told, among its 275 million speakers, in excess of 96 million live in Africa, yet it additionally speaks to the second most generally communicated in local language and unknown dialect in Europe. At long last, continuously 2050, it is evaluated that French will the language generally spoken on the planet.
It is important to understand the different accents and explore the various types of French spoken across the world. In our series French Around the World will present the 9 main types of French spoken around the world, as well the countries where they are spoken. Nota Bene: this list is not all-encompassing and there are many other accents and dialects of French within these regions and all over the world.
1. Québec and New Brunskwick
In Eastern Canada, there are mainly two types of French that are spoken – French in Quebec (or Québécois French) and French on the maritime coast, known as Acadian French.
Although the grammar and written expressions of Acadian French and Québécois French are the same as Standard/International French, it is at the spoken level that the differences in accents can really be heard.
In Québécois, vowels with nasal intonation are even more nasalized. The ‘un’ sound has virtually disappeared from International French, but it is still spoken in Québécois. The high vowels i, u, and ou are pronounced laxing when used in closed syllables in Québécois. In International French, vowels that used to have a long pronunciation three centuries ago no longer do, but in Québécois , that old pronunciation remains. For example, words like “mâle” and “mal”, “pâte” and “patte”, “faîte” and “faites”, “maître” and “mettre” sound virtually the same in France, though not in spoken Québécois.
Another very distinctive pronunciation in Québécois is the way the letters ‘D’ and ‘T’ are pronounced as ‘Dzz’ and ‘Tss’ when placed before the vowels ‘u’ and ‘i.’ This pronunciation is often carried over in formal speech, where it does not exist on any level of speech in Metropolitan French.
However, when Québécois is spoken informally the differences between these two versions of French become obvious and it is quite easy to tell them apart.
