[BRIEF NOTE] On Québec French

[rfmcdonald]

It's well-known that disputes over the relative statuses of the English and French languages in Québec are commonplace. What isn'tknown nearly as well is the conflict between Québec's local dialect of French and the European French that's the international standard for the language. As pointed out here, there are significant lexical and other differences between the two dialects. These differences becamie major issues during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, as people challenging cultural conventions attacked the belief that Standard French was the only acceptable version of the language and that French as it was spoken was not different but flawed. One of these activists went so far as to write a Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise, with a more moderate sort of language normalization actually taken place, with different versions of Québec French becoming the normal language of spoken discourse, not so much a written one.. As for the accent, well, Francophones from France are said to often find it funny and perhaps incomprehensible. The latest we Anglophones have heard of this debate, as described in Les Perreaux's article in The Globe and Mail ("'Deplorable' Québécois accent has royal roots, linguist asserts") is linguist Jean-Denis Gendron's contentious argument that Québec French is in fact the French of the 17th and 18th centuries.

"The Québécois accent is one from the noblesse of the time, it is a relaxed, natural accent," Jean-Denis Gendron, a retired professor from Laval University, argues in the October edition of Quebec Sciences. "It's only much later that our accent came to be viewed as an abomination."

The Quebec accent's voyage from the king's court to linguistic "abomination" can be traced through historical events and the accounts of visitors to the colonies, Mr. Gendron argues.

Early settlers in New France came from western France and were highly influenced by the Parisien aristocracy. Later, in the colonial era, clergy, military officers and local governors carried on with that influence.

Mr. Gendron's research shows that as late as 1757, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville wrote that "the Canadian accent is as pure as that of the Parisians." Around the same time, a French clergyman said Canadian French was closer to the language spoken in Paris than the French spoken in Bordeaux or Marseilles.

The language link changed dramatically over the next 50 years.

The English victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 cut off links with France even as French academics worked on a massive project to standardize grammar and pronunciation.

"They got rid of all the pronunciations they didn't judge perfect for high society, and the cleanup continued through the 18th century," said Claude Poirier, an expert in French-language history at Laval University.

The French revolution of the 1790s eliminated the French aristocracy who still shared Canadian speech patterns, Mr. Gendron said.

The French re-established links with their French-Canadian cousins in the 1800s and found a language they barely understood. In 1810, the Paris-trained Englishman John Lambert was among the first to note the "deplorable" French-Canadian accent, but he was soon backed by French explorers Théodore Pavie and Alexis de Tocqueville.

"These travellers spoke with the new French accent and they found our accent very bizarre," Mr. Gendron said.

Other commentators point out later in the article that this is only a partial explanation--few of the migrants who settled French Canada came from the Paris basin or had connections with the aristocracy, while the local dialects has words from the regions of northern and western France that provided the most settlers as well as English. It also seems obvious to me that it's an attempt to inverse the pecking order of French dialects. That said, it's certainly a provocative take on the subject of French diaelcts: The periphery, it seems, talks back.