From what I heard, Québécois have no problem understanding European French accents due to exposure to French media. On the other hand, a lot of French people find Québec accents a bit difficult to understand because of the lack of exposure to it.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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From my experience that's fairly accurate. Although I'd say it doesn't take very long for French people to start understanding our accent, like by the end of a week long trip they'll understand 95% of it.
It's not so much our accent as it is the jargon in my opinion. The Quebec french speakers can use a lot jargon that may seem or come off a little hillbillyish to European french speakers.
Not a native speaker, but Quebecois, especially spoken, can involve pretty deep differences in grammar and syntax. Much more than the difference between British and American English.
Example:
Contractions: "M'va le mettre s'a table." = "Je vais le mettre sur la table."
Shortenings: "J'avais plus de nourriture faque chui allé à l'épicerie." = "J'avais plus de nourriture donc je suis allé au marché."
Question particle: "Il veut-tu quelque chose à manger?" = "Veut-il quelque chose à manger?"
I think it's closer to African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Scots. Most people who speak AAVE/Scots can code switch to standard British or American English, but not vice versa. Some people even seem to hold similar class and discriminatory connotations, unfortunately.
Hey not to be too particular but shouldn't
"J'avais plus de nourriture donc je suis allé au marché."
Be "Je n'avais plus de nourriture donc je suis allé au marché"?
Technically yes, but in spoken french the "ne" is often elided. "Je l'ai pas lu" is perfectly normal spoken French.
To disambiguate between "ne plus" and "plus", the "s" at the end isn't pronounced in the negative, and is pronounced in the positive.
Wow I had no idea :) been french immersion since I was in preschool, but these are the things you usually only learn by immersing yourself in spoken language with native speakers. Thanks for the tip!
As a french canadian, I do see it similarly to American/British English. It's two dialects of the same language that have evolved separately over 400 years. So of course a lot of idioms and some words are different, but we do understand each other verbally with a bit of effort and easily by text. If someone told you had a parisian accent, then yea they mean you sound like european French.
That’s interesting - are they more separated than American / British English? There is a fair amount different between the English variants, but so much media makes it across the Atlantic I don’t think there’s any difficulty in understanding
I'm a non-native french speaker but I liken it more to American and Scottish. Non native speakers of English probably have trouble understanding Scottish unless they learned that accent specifically or they are at an extremely high level. (Some native English speakers will also struggle a bit!) Obviously it's not quite the same but yeah, the main thing that makes it difficult for me to understand Quebecois french is the pronunciation, not necessarily the different phrases and words used (but they can be a bit confusing). Take this with a grain of salt as I have only ever watched tv shows/movies/YouTube as input for that accent. I still need to get to Canada!
French here, and I've been to Quebec before. Many French consider the Québéquois accent funny. It's a but more nasal. That being said, I didn't have much trouble understanding people there.
I'm Canadian and (somewhat) speak Canadian French. My online friend is English and he is fluent in European French. We understand each-other fairly well but there's a time every so often where we need to explain what a certain word or phrase means because it's unfamiliar. Quebecois is almost like slang, if that makes sense.