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Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 21 hours agoI am actually fully bilingual eng/fr, went to school in french, but have a particular regional Canadian accent. Whenever in France, everyone responds in English anyways. They don’t like the accent at all. After ordering a beer at a bar in the latin quarter after checking into my hotel, an older woman sitting at the bar as a customer turned to me and said “Vous parlez mal”. i.e. You speak badly.
In my year learning French at school, I befriended someone in toulouse and we’d have quick occasional video chats. The face she made while i was talking made it seem like i was doing nails on chalkboard. She visibly squirmed a bit.
My teacher on the other hand noticed I pronounced certain words in a toulousian accent and was pleased. Apparently it’s a nice accent. It’s too bad i didn’t keep going. Could have visited France and terrorized the locals by forcing them to listen to me speak.
Vous parlez mal". i.e. You speak badly. I’ll never forget the horror in her eye
It’s funny that she would think that our french is worse than theirs, when canadian french is closer to actual french than parisian french.
Is it closer?
What is “actual French”?
Well if you go back 500 years, every little corner of france has their own version of french, with Paris speaking roughly what they speak today. Canadians descend from other regions, mostly the north and west and inherited their way of speaking. So I call it “actual french” but really I just mean the french that was most common at the time, since this was the most populated region of france with a lot less people living in Paris.
This can be traced to a variety of sounds that we have in canadian french that are present throughout France as accents but not in the modern “standard french”. Such as the “eu” in “beurre”.
I don’t really have a source for this, this is what they teach us in school.
Enoril@jlai.lu 10 hours ago
It takes me about 15min before being able to understand the canadian accent and stop trying to recognize every words. That requires a lot of concentration to decipher each words. During my first meeting with Canadians, we had to switch back to English has it was easier to understand.
It’s like when you talk to an old farmer lost in the middle of nowhere and you need subtitles to understand the words. That requires practice!