Sunday, 4 November 2012

Differences between French in Quebec and France



I have recently seen an interesting video explaining the differences between French spoken in France and the dialect spoken in Canada. French is used mostly in Quebec- the only francophone Canadian province.  Montreal is the second largest francophone city in the world after Paris. The accent is different, harder, we can notice some Anglo-Saxon  influences. Some people believe that the Quebec version is the one which was used by French people in XVII century during the conquest of this province by Cartier. The fact is Quebec accent differs a lot and it’s hard to understand it if you are not used to it. There’s a law 101 which orders to translate each English word into French to prevent this language from disappearing in Canada.  Metropolitan French has many anglicisms, e. g. on a stop sign in Quebec we can notice “Arret” inscription in contrast to France which adopted English term “Stop”.  If you want to know more about cultural and linguistic differences between those two francophone countries I recommend to watch this video which has English subtitles.

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