Квебекский французский язык: история и особенности

Dialect of French spoken mainly in Quebec, Canada

Quebec French ( fʁɑ̃sɛ kebekwa), also known as Québécois French, is the predominant variety of the French language spoken in Canada. It is the dominant language of the province of Quebec, used in everyday communication, in education, the media, and government. Canadian French is a common umbrella term to describe all varieties of French used in Canada, including Quebec French. Formerly it was used to refer solely to Quebec French and the closely related dialects spoken in Ontario and Western Canada, in contrast with Acadian French, which is spoken in some areas of eastern Quebec (Gaspé Peninsula), New Brunswick, and in other parts of Atlantic Canada, and Métis French, which is found generally across the Prairie provinces. The term joual is commonly used to refer to Quebec working class French (when considered a basilect), characterized by certain features often perceived as phased out, "old world" or "incorrect" in standard French. Joual, in particular, exhibits strong Norman influences largely owing to Norman immigration during the Ancien Régime (they were perceived as true Catholics and allowed to immigrate to the new world as an example of ideal French settlers). For example the word placoter can mean both to splash around or to chatter which comes from the Norman French word clapoter which means the same thing. Its equivalent in Acadian French is called Chiac.

The origins of Quebec French lie in the 17th and 18th century regional varieties (dialects) of early modern French, also known as Classical French, and of other langues d'oïl (especially Poitevin dialect, Saintongeais dialect and Norman) that French colonists brought to New France. Quebec French either evolved from this language base and was shaped by the following influences (arranged according to historical period) or was imported from Paris and other urban centres of France as a koiné, or common language shared by the people speaking it.

Unlike the language of France in the 17th and 18th centuries, French in New France was fairly well unified. It also began to borrow words and gather importations (see loan word), especially place names such as Québec, Canada and Hochelaga, and words to describe the flora and fauna such as atoca (cranberry) and achigan (largemouth bass), from First Nations languages. The importance of the rivers and ocean as the main routes of transportation also left its imprint on Quebec French. Whereas European varieties of French use the verbs monter and descendre for "to get in" and "to get out" of a vehicle (lit. "to mount" and "to dismount", as one does with a horse or a carriage), the Québécois variety in its informal register tends to use embarquer and débarquer, a result of Quebec's navigational heritage.

With the onset of British rule in 1760, the French of Canada became isolated from that of Europe. This led to a retention of older pronunciations, such as moé for moi and expressions that later died out in France. In 1774, the Quebec Act guaranteed French settlers as British subjects rights to French law, the Roman Catholic faith and the French language to appease them at a moment when the English speaking colonies to the south were on the verge of revolting in the American Revolution.

After Canadian Confederation in 1867, Quebec started to industrialize, leading to the expansion of cities and increased contact between French and English speakers. Business in Quebec, especially that with the rest of Canada and with the United States, was conducted in English. Also, communications to and within the Canadian federal government were conducted almost exclusively in English. This period included a sharp increase in immigration from the United Kingdom, particularly to Montreal, which resembled a majority anglophone city in terms of its commercial life, but retained a predominantly francophone population. As a result, Quebec French began to borrow from both Canadian and American English to fill accidental gaps in the lexical fields of government, law, manufacturing, business and trade. A great number of Francophones went to the United States to seek employment. When they returned, they brought with them new words taken from their experiences in the New England textile mills and the northern lumber camps.

By the time of World War I, a majority of Quebec's population lived in urban areas for the first time. The era from this period to the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959 was marked by massive modernization of the province. It was during this period that French language radio and television broadcasting, with a façade of European pronunciation, began in Canada. While Quebec French borrowed many English language brand names during this time, Quebec's first modern terminological efforts bore a French lexicon for (ice) hockey, one of the national sports of Canada. The era following World War II was also marked by the arrival of large waves of allophone immigrants, whose native language was neither French nor English; most tended to gravitate to the latter.

From the Quiet Revolution to the passing of the Charter of the French Language, the French language in Quebec saw a period of validation in its varieties associated with the working class while the percentage of literate and university educated francophones grew. Laws concerning the status of French were passed both on the federal and provincial levels. The Office québécois de la langue française was established to play an essential role of support in language planning. In Ontario, the first French language public secondary schools were built in the 1960s, but not without confrontations. West Nipissing, Penetanguishene and Windsor each experienced its own school crisis.

Although Quebec French constitutes a coherent and standard system, it has no objective norm as the very organization mandated to establish it, the Office québécois de la langue française, believes that objectively standardizing Quebec French would lead to reduced mutual intelligibility with other French communities around the world, linguistically isolating Quebeckers and possibly causing the extinction of the French language in the Americas. This governmental institution has nonetheless published many dictionaries and terminological guidelines since the 1960s, effectively allowing many Canadianisms (canadianismes de bon aloi) or more often Quebecisms (French words local to Canada or Quebec) that describe specifically North American realities. It also creates new, morphologically well formed words to describe technological evolutions. There is a negative perception of Quebec French traits by some of the Québécois themselves, coupled with a desire to conform their language to the Metropolitan French norm. This explains why most of the differences between Quebec French and Metropolitan French documented are marked as "informal" or "colloquial".

Historically speaking, the closest relative of Quebec French is the 17th and 18th century koiné of Paris. Formal Quebec French uses essentially the same orthography and grammar as the French of France, with few exceptions, and exhibits moderate lexical differences. Differences in grammar and lexicon become more marked as language becomes more informal. While phonetic differences also decrease with greater formality, Quebec and European accents are readily distinguishable in all registers. Over time, European French has exerted a strong influence on Quebec French. The phonological features traditionally distinguishing informal Quebec French and formal European French have gradually acquired varying sociolinguistic status, so that certain traits of Quebec French are perceived neutrally or positively by Quebecers, while others are perceived negatively.

Sociolinguistic studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s showed that Quebecers generally rated speakers of European French heard in recordings higher than speakers of Quebec French in many positive traits, including expected intelligence, education, ambition, friendliness and physical strength. The researchers were surprised by the greater friendliness rating for Europeans, since one of the primary reasons usually advanced to explain the retention of low status language varieties is social solidarity with members of one's linguistic group. François Labelle cites the efforts at that time by the Office québécois de la langue française "to impose a French as standard as possible" Ostiguy and Tousignant doubt whether Quebecers today would still have the same negative attitudes towards their own variety of French that they did in the 1970s. They argue that negative social attitudes have focused instead on a subset of the characteristics of Quebec French relative to European French, and particularly some traits of informal Quebec French. Some characteristics of European French are even judged negatively when imitated by Quebecers.

Quebec French has some typographical differences from European French. For example, in Quebec French a full non breaking space is not used before the semicolon, exclamation mark, or question mark. Instead, a thin space (which according to Le Ramat de la typographie normally measures a quarter of an em

A notable difference in grammar which received considerable attention in France during the 1990s is the feminine form of many professions that traditionally did not have a feminine form. In Quebec, one writes nearly universally une chercheuse or une chercheure "a researcher", whereas in France, un chercheur and, more recently, un chercheur and une chercheuse are used. Feminine forms in as in are still strongly criticized in France by institutions like the , but are commonly used in Canada and Switzerland. There are other, sporadic spelling differences. For example, the Office québécois de la langue française formerly recommended the spelling tofou for what is in France tofu "tofu". This recommendation was repealed in 2013. In grammar, the adjective inuit "Inuit" is invariable in France but, according to official recommendations in Quebec, has regular feminine and plural forms.

Grammatical differences between informal spoken Quebec French and the formal language abound. Some of these, such as omission of the negative particle ne, are also present in the informal language of speakers of standard European French, while other features, such as use of the interrogative particle tu, are either peculiar to Quebec or Canadian French or restricted to nonstandard varieties of European French.

One characteristic of major sociological importance distinguishing Quebec from European French is the relatively greater number of borrowings from English, especially in the informal spoken language, but that notion is often exaggerated. The Québécois have been found to show a stronger aversion to the use of anglicisms in formal contexts than do European francophones, largely because of what the influence of English on their language is held to reveal about the historically superior position of anglophones in Canadian society. According to Cajolet Laganière and Martel, out of 4,216 "criticized borrowings from English" in Quebec French that they were able to identify, some 93% have "extremely low frequency" and 60% are obsolete. Despite this, the prevalence of anglicisms in Quebec French has often been exaggerated. Various anglicisms commonly used in European French informal language are mostly not used by Quebec French speakers. While words such as shopping, parking, escalator, ticket, email and week end are commonly spoken in Europe, Quebec tends to favour French equivalents, namely: magasinage, stationnement, escalier roulant, billet, courriel and fin de semaine, respectively. As such, the perception of exaggerated anglicism use in Quebec French could be attributed, in part, simply to the fact that the anglicisms used are different, and thus more noticeable by European speakers. French spoken with a large number of anglicisms may be disparagingly termed nocat=true. According to Chantal Bouchard, "While the language spoken in Quebec did indeed gradually accumulate borrowings from English [between 1850 and 1960], it did not change to such an extent as to justify the extraordinarily negative discourse about it between 1940 and 1960. It is instead in the loss of social position suffered by a large proportion of Francophones since the end of the 19th century that one must seek the principal source of this degrading perception."

Ouaouaron, the Canadian French word for bullfrog, a frog species native to North America, originates from an Iroquois word. Maringouin, the word for mosquito, also originates from an aboriginal language, Tupi guarani, spoken by aboriginals on the northern coasts of Brazil. It is thought that early French colonists adopted this word in the late 1600s after exchanges with explorers returning from South America.

On Twitter, supporters of the Quebec separatist party Bloc Québécois used hashtags that align with the syntactic pattern found in hashtags used in French political discourse, rather than adopting the hashtags commonly used by other Canadian parties with similar political positions.

For phonological comparisons of Quebec French, Belgian French, Meridional French, and Metropolitan French, see French phonology.

These examples are intended not exhaustive but illustrate the complex influence that European French has had on Quebec French pronunciation and the range of sociolinguistic statuses that individual phonetic variables can possess. The most entrenched features of Quebec pronunciation are such that their absence, even in the most formal registers, is considered an indication of foreign origin of the speaker. That is the case, for example, for the affrication of and before , , and (This particular feature of Quebec French is, however, sometimes avoided in singing.) The use of the lax Quebec allophones of , , (in the appropriate phonetic contexts) occurs in all but highly formal styles, and even then, their use predominates. Use of the tense allophones where the lax ones would be expected can be perceived as "pedantic". The Quebec variant of nasal vowels , , and corresponding to the Parisian (traditionally pronounced ), (traditionally pronounced ), (traditionally pronounced ) and (traditionally pronounced ) are not subject to a significant negative sociolinguistic evaluation and are used by most speakers and of educated speakers in all circumstances. However, Parisian variants also appear occasionally in formal speech among a few speakers, especially speakers who were often watching cartoons when they were a child, because the dubbing affected them and it is not considered as a Quebec accent. Some speakers use them in Radio Canada, but they never have brin brun merger (The preceding discussion applies to stressed syllables. For reasons unrelated to their social standing, some allophones close to the European variants appear frequently in unstressed syllables.) To pronounce instead of in such words as gâteau clearly predominates in informal speech and, according to Ostiguy and Tousignant, is likely not to be perceived negatively in informal situations. However, sociolinguistic research has shown that not to be the case in formal speech, when the standard is more common. However, many speakers use systematically in all situations, and Ostiguy and Tousignant hypothesize that such speakers tend to be less educated. It must be mentioned that a third vowel , though infrequent, also occurs and is the vowel that has emerged with as a new European standard in the last several decades for words in this category. According to Ostiguy and Tousignant, this pronunciation is seen as "affected", and Dumas writes that speakers using this pronunciation "run the risk of being accused of snobbery." Entirely analogous considerations apply to the two pronunciations of such words as chat, which can be pronounced or The diphthonged variants of such words as fête (e. g. instead of ), are rarely used in formal speech. They have been explicitly and extensively stigmatized and were, according to the official Quebec educational curricula of 1959 and 1969, among the pronunciation habits to be "standardized" in pupils. In informal speech, however, most speakers use generally such forms to some extent, but they are viewed negatively and are more frequent among uneducated speakers. However, many Québécois teachers use the diphthongization. Traditional pronunciations such as for poil (also , as in France. Words in this category include avoine, (ils) reçoivent, noirci, etc. ) and for moi (now usually , as in France; this category consists of moi, toi, and verb forms such as (je) bois and (on) reçoit but excludes québécois and toit, which have had only the pronunciation ), are no longer used by many speakers, and are virtually absent from formal speech. They have long been the object of condemnation. On the other hand, writing in 1987, he considers in words in the poil group "the most common pronunciation." One of the most striking changes that has affected Quebec French in recent decades is the displacement of the alveolar trill r by the uvular trill r , originally from Northern France, and similar acoustically to the Parisian uvular r Historically, the alveolar r predominated in western Quebec, including Montreal, and the uvular r in eastern Quebec, including Quebec City, with an isogloss near Trois Rivières. (More precisely, the isogloss runs through Yamachiche and then between Sherbrooke and La Patrie, near the American border. With only a few exceptions, the alveolar variant predominates in Canada outside Quebec.) Elocution teachers and the clergy traditionally favoured the trilled r, which was nearly universal in Montreal until the 1950s and was perceived positively. However, massive migration from eastern Quebec beginning in the 1930s with the Great Depression, the participation of soldiers in the Second World War, travel to Europe after the war, and especially the use of the uvular r in radio and then television broadcasts all quickly reversed perceptions and favoured the spread of the uvular r. The trilled r is now rapidly declining. According to Ostiguy and Tousignant, the change occurred within a single generation. The Parisian uvular r is also present in Quebec, and its use is positively correlated with socioeconomic status.