Quebecois French has long been mocked for its rough-and-tumble sound, but this version of French is more likely what 17th-Century French aristocracy spoke – including the king.
Claude Poirier, a historian of Quebec French at the Université Laval in Quebec City, has spent a lot of time poring over 17th-Century archival documents to determine if the spelling of certain words could give us an idea of their pronunciation. He found that in the 1658 court acts, a lawyer who came to Quebec from Poitou in west-central France "spelled perdre ('lose') as pardre, which is closer to how some people in Quebec still pronounce the word." Another example he found was the word devoir ("must" or "to be obligated to"). It was spelled devour, he said, and was pronounced devou-air, the way many elderly Quebecois still pronounce it today.
Another major difference is vocabulary. Words like char for "car"; piasse, slang for "dollar"; dispendieux for "expensive"; patate for "potato"; and barré for "locked" instead of the normative French fermé à clef ("closed with a key") all originate from a more antiquated French no longer used in France.
So how is that Quebec's version retained more 17th-Century aristocratic relics than what's spoken in Paris, the accepted seat of the French language?
Both Bouchard and Poirier noted that 16th- and 17th-Century French settlers who immigrated to Quebec, then known as New France, tended to be natives of northern and western France. Aside from royalty and the aristocracy, only one-third of the people in France spoke French at that time. The rest spoke their regional languages, such as Breton, Provencal or Norman.
In New France, however, concerted efforts were made to teach the new arrivals French – and it was the version spoken at the royal court by the aristocrats of the north and west. Thus, aristocratic French became generalised among the settlers. In the mid 1700s, French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville even wrote that "the Canadian accent is as pure as that of the Parisians".
But everything began to change in 1759 when France lost its colony to the British at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City. Contact between France and New France was ruptured, and with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, a good part of the elite returned to Europe.
More dramatic changes came with the French Revolution, cutting off the mother country from its former colony for another four decades.
According to Poirier, during this period of alienation, scholars in France embarked on a massive effort to spread the use of French and standardise its grammar and pronunciation. "The bourgeoisie dumped all the pronunciations they didn't deem perfect, and they continued their purification through the 18th Century," he said.
In short, French in France changed, while in Quebec it stayed more or less the same. "The Quebecois are conservatives," said Poirier. "They conserved the French language as it was spoken in the 'ancien régime'."
The royal roots of Quebec's French
Quebecois French has long been mocked for its rough-and-tumble sound, but this version of French is more likely what 17th-Century French aristocracy spoke – including the king.
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