Québec has language laws that prevent businesses from using English in their advertising among other things, and some controversial rulings have come from it. One such ruling was the use of “le week-end”. Québec was punishing businesses who used this term instead of “la fin de semaine”. There was an interview done with an official from the language police where the interviewer had a dictionary from France which showed “le week-end” is proper French. The Québec official said “France doesn’t decide what words are French. We do.”
TIL the French Language Police is a thing
Il y en a deux ! Une pour la France et une pour le Québec mais la majorité des locuteurs du français sont en Afrique.
I’m not finding any info on this. Source?
I tried searching for it before posting but couldn’t find it. It was a radio interview likely sometime in the 80s. It’s hard to find because a search for controversial things the Québec language police have done turns up a lot of results.
This tracks
L’Académie française disagrees
L’académie française deez nuts
Gottem
Oh please. There isn’t a single linguist in the Académie Française.
The Académie Française is to the French language what a group of former weathermen is to climatology.
Honnêtement, tu donnes un peu trop de crédibilité à l’Académie française dans ta comparaison.
Can we take a sidebar over here, and recognize how VIOLENTLY (possibly literally) English speakers would reject that sort of sometimes-it’s-actually-legally-binding official language board?
Even those Karen type motherfuckers, who will openly yell at people at McDonald’s for speaking some non-English language would FULLY reject any ivory-tower shithead telling THEM exactly how to speak English.
I mean, they would be the FIRST people to to reject that shit, and they would reject it the most forcefully. And they would be entirely correct, for once. The duty of dictionary compilers, linguists, and everyone else in that general field is to RECORD the evolution of languages. It is never their duty to PRESCRIBE usage.
That is, and I’m choosing my words very carefully here, SOME NAZI SHIT. It’s authoritarian nonsense. It’s never okay. For any reason. Whatever reason you think you have, it’s not good enough.
Try to legally enforce rules on how I can speak my own language? Do that right to my face? Some stick-up-the-ass language Gestapo comes at me with that shit, I’m liable to loosen his fucking teeth. Then he could see how ironic it’d be, when he couldn’t pronounce any fricatives correctly. Don’t test me. I will do it. And so will every other English speaker, regardless of race, creed, class, color, nationality, etc.
That’s why no majority-English-speaking nation has any of these fascist-ass language academies. We won’t stand for it.
Chill dude…
Fair enough.
Prescriptivist jerks. Let’s all dress up in $50,000 robes, call ourselves immortals, and pretend that we can control language.
Make anglo minority in Canada again then we could talk.
Also we could talk to make this project happened.Attend. Pourquoi je dis ça en anglais moi ??
Tu t’es fait retourner le cerveau!
Every french speaker is delusional.
That’s a very un-Picard-like Maneuver
🤢 Fr*nch “people” 🤮
You’re not on reddit no more, bud
Everything I don’t like is reddit.
And Fr*nch “people”.
Canada is home to the largest French speaking population in the world that has never surrendered to Germany.
I think that is DR Congo. More french speakers than France.
More French speakers than Quebec, New Brunswick, and a smattering here & there in other provinces? The only other thing the French in this country have is poutine. The least we can do is give them this.
La poutine n’est pas française et je vous prierais de surveiller votre ton lorsque vous parlez à mes colocuteurs d’outre-atlantique. Vive le Canada francophone et le Cameroun.
7.6 million in Canada. 72.1 million in DR Congo. It’s not even close.
It’s crazy how small people think Africa is, as if it isn’t the 2nd most populous continent with Nigeria on track to overtake the US in population by 2050. Africa is projected to meet the same population as Asia by 2100 (both are likely to separately have about 3-4x the population of every other continent combined)
Of course a country in the most populous section of Africa have more people who speak the national language than in Canada! Nigeria has like 4x the amount of English speakers of Canada, and Uganda & Egypt both have around the same amount as Canada.
Give Canada some respect, DR Congo didn’t even exist until after WWII.
They made up for it by surrendering to the British and having their land sold to the Americans.
I mean, you’re not wrong, but the French in this country have made being a pain in the English-speaking population’s ass their entire raison d’être since like 1760. They’ve been fighting a resistance war for like 264 years which is why I consider it a good roadtrip if I can get from Cornwall to Edmundston without having to stop. Beautiful province but a pain in the dick to even exist in if you’re an Anglo.
I’m an American anglophone that lives in Quebec for work and uh, yeah. These people are constantly fighting a culture war that nobody else gives a shit about or signed up for. There should never be language police.
Are we talking the language? West of Quebec French is rare.
Ontario has some significant pockets of french Canadians
Ottawa comes to mind.
Yeah in Sask I’ve encountered two french speaking people (first language Quebecers)in the last decade. Both spoke English.
Both commented on how people’s expressions turn negative when they hear the accent. Which I can understand as it sounds very gutteral and unpleasant to the ear to me as well.
Plenty in Manitoba but they’ll also speak English. St Boniface is an entire neighborhood in Winnipeg where French is primary, including the arret signs. There’s a number of towns around the province where it’s the primary language as well. Bilingual of course but French is the usual spoken language.
Ahhhh the French
mm yes drew durnil
Baguette Baguette!
Tabarnac
Viva la
FranceCanadaY a pas moyen Djadja
chuis pas ta catin Djadja
Genre, en catchana baby, tu dead çaimbattable.
Solide
I lived in both ‘French Canada’, and France at one point in my life.
In my experience, they all consider themselves the best thing France ever made and the other side are the equivalent of “rednecks”
To be fair, they both can be right.
To be fair if you’re used to “metropolitan” French then some Québécois accents can sound very “redneck”.
I never got this: why do people in France speak an American language instead of a European one?
See, the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur…
French-Canadian from Quebec here: the same way an American will use a french word mid sentence to add a certain je-ne-sais-quoi…
But they tend to go way overboard with them, ending with bastardized, barely comprehensible french. And they dare correct us when we use the proper french terms instead of the ones they abuse.
I was watching a video on YouTube today where the person was demonstrating some things and kept going “viola”, but everytime he said it, he didn’t really pronounce the v, so it sounded more like moilah. One step away from moolah (slang for money).
It was bizarre.
I just couldn’t not hear it. I completely forget what the video was about.
I intentionally mispronounce voila as viola. As in the string instrument.
Be careful with this, Viola sounds close to the past perfect of the verb violer, which can mean to break a rule (violer une règle) or worse, to rape
I doubt an English listener would make that mistake, sounds nothing like “violate.”
Removed by mod
I don’t get it. How is French an American language? I don’t understand the meme overall either
French is spoken in France and parts of north America. Most people are very emotional about their native language so they feel every deviation of it is just wrong.
The most common and seemingly natural view is that France French is “right” and oversea French is not but honestly it’s arbitrary. OP turned it around and so I did too, eventhough I myself live in a non French European country. Well, we all hate our neighbors and the enemy is my enemy is my friend I guess.
I once was at a work function where I saw a French-Canadian and a Walloon French (Belgium) mock the French spoken by a Parisian.
C’est normal. Les français aussi le font.
I’ve heard Canadian French is closer to the French France Frenched a few hundred years ago.
IIRC that’s correct.
Kinda like how the American accent is closer to OG British English than the current British English pronunciation.
That’s a false fact. And it’s apparent, since there are dozens of accents in the US as well as umin the UK and there were dozens in the UK 200 years ago. They all developed in their own direction, being sometimes isolated sometimes cross-pollinating with other accents, but none staid the same.
motions hand above head while making airplane noises
*aeroplane
I think it’s souppoused to be spelled prounounciautioun
I’ve been believing this for a very long time but I’ve seen a video made by a French Canadian that proved me wrong
As a matter of fact, when first immigrants arrived in Nova Scotia, most of the French people weren’t even speaking French, but regional dialects.
What happened is that immigrants had to spend long periods of time in big ports of France before taking the boat to the new World and this is how they learned to speak French.
But English was the language mainly used for trades, and local French speakers included a lot of English words in their daily dictionary (which were then exported to France)
Then England took control of Canada and tried to eradicate the French spoken there because they thought it was impure and perverted.
French speakers were pissed, and began to protect the language with tough anti-English rules
Uh pretty sure protection of French language (and Catholicism) was agreed on from the start. Otherwise there would have been rebellions.
Language, religion, and laws. This is why Quebec is predominantly French, doesn’t use British common law like America and the rest of Canada, and was predominantly catholic at a time when a lot of places required you to follow the king’s (or queen’s) religion.
And why a Catholic school board exists in the entire country. We’re far past the point it should be allowed to exist, but afaik it’s in the constitution and hard to get rid of.
Before the moment England took control of the Canada there wasn’t any protective law because there wasn’t a need to.
Protection measures appeared after that
I’m responding to “tried to eradicate the French spoken there”. When they took over, I’m pretty sure they agreed to the French language and Catholicism from the very beginning. They didn’t try to eradicate it. Protection didn’t come from failed eradication attempts, protection was agreed to from the start.
And why do they speak mexican in spain?
Oh please, Ontario is just a polite and liberal mini-USA
As a resident of Ontario…
Fuck you.
Also, very accurate, and I hate it. Take your upvote and get out.
Yeah real french is skipping french class and forgetting that quebec exists :)
if Ontario defines what “liberal” is, then we’re doomed.
Does Ontario only look liberal in comparison with Alberta?
They both look like three oligopolies in a trenchcoat.
Ontario politicians don’t show the same overt ideological capture that defines Albertan politics, but it’s there under the surface.
50/50?
Depends on where in Ontario we’re talking about … everything south of Orillia is basically the United States, between Orillia and North Bay is like the Ozarks, between North Bay and Thunder Bay is equal parts socialist and capitalist, and the entire France sized north is the chaotic frontier (I know because I’m indigenous and this is where my family is from).
Ontario isn’t one mentality and every election cycle, there is more and more of a need to break up the regions because the south doesn’t represent the north and the north is constantly in conflict with the south.
fair enough. My experience is only with what the provincial government does, so, like you say, I don’t get a view of the north.
*Canada outside of Quebec and some parts of New Brunswick
