The most realistic possible future of the French language can be seen in shows like Star Trek and Futurama.
So a little historical context. The French originally started in both manatoba and Quebec. But over the years the French culture started dying out. To combat this .gov started to instill mandatory French language across the country and promote French culture.
I’d say they originally started out in France, but I don’t know much about history.
Nope, french caandians started in NA.
Is this a Mormon thing?
On niaise pas avec le francais chez nous, tokebekicitte.
Tabernacle!
In France, the French language is not threatened, so they can afford to incorporate some English words.
In Quebec, the French language is constantly under threat from all sides, so they make efforts to stop the flow.
This isn’t rocket science folks. Nothing is more normal than protecting your own turf.
That’s very interesting but eastern Germany appearing on maps again worries me.
It is the price for peace on the Balkans. Yugoslavia is united again after all. So is Czechoslovakia.
As a west german: We should (re-)build the wall and make the Ossis pay for it.
I read that as make Oasis pay for it, not a bad idea because after all, it’d be a wonderwall.
I hear you québécois in the comments, you have French words we dont have and I do think it’s great. And when I watched your TV it seemed to be mostly French.
But when I listen to podcasts it’s English words in every sentence.
Same is happening I France now, but we suck at English so it doesn’t sound good. “Cette chanson est un ban-guhrr”
Also everybody started using “du coup” 10 years ago. Ainsi, donc, apres quoi, puis, car, puisque, etc… - > du coup
Damn, didn’t expect this place to be this hostile to French Canadians. I guess it’s not much of an improvement over Reddit afterall.
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Anglo Canada loves you.
Right? The French hate us, they were the original separatist
You can’t separate separatists! Thing is separate me once, can’t separate me again.
My hate for the French is my only gripe with Reddit.
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Okay, (funny) story time.
I’m French and live in France. Many years ago I met a girl from Quebec (Chicoutimi), and in our discussion she told me that when she arrived in France, her first night the heating was off in her flat and it was very cold. She tried to sleep in what she referred to as her “slip” (French for panties), but even though it was a Canadian slip that was very warm that she used in her cabin in Northern Canada, she was too cold to sleep.
After a good 5 minutes of thinking “that story doesn’t make sense, if she’s hitting on me it’s too obvious and weird”, she saw my confusion and asked me if I knew what she meant by “slip” (panties in French).
It turns out she was referring to her sleep, short for sleeping bag in English. In French we use the French word “sac de couchage”. The pronunciations are identical.
So both French and Québécois has a lot of borrowed word, just not the same ones.
Slip from slipinne bague. Did you at some point offer her to meet your “gosses”
I didn’t get the part about gosses?
Je suis du sud du Québec et je l’aurais pas compris. J’ai jamais entendu sleep de ma vie pour désigner un sac de couchage.
Je suis du sud du Québec et j’ai toujours entendu ça… C’est pas juste au Saguenay, en tout cas.
J’ai entendu “sleeping” très souvent, mais pas juste “sleep”. J’aurais été confus moi aussi.
Le monde est bizarre. Comme ceux qui disent coton ouaté pour désigner un kangourou. /s
kangourou
Tu parles d’un bunnyhug? J’ai encontré ce mot en Saskatcheouane
Ouais, un chandail à capuche!
pourquoi?
Love the idea of extra warm Canadian panties
Yeah I was already picturing the fur.
Mmhhhh
So both French and Québécois
I like how you think your language is “French” and hers isn’t.
That must have been a challenge to dub. In the original Bart is speaking English, not Quebecois French. So, when Bart is speaking Quebecois French he must have really leaned into the accent to make it believable that the policeman didn’t understand.
Here’s the original for comparison:
https://youtu.be/EUSGPubsxcM?t=93
It’s funny because in the original the policeman is the only character in the scene with a decent French accent. The two criminals sound absolutely horrible.
Fair point I guess I should have said French from France or from the metropole? Pretty sure the term dialect can’t be applied here.
In France nowadays French is a relatively homogeneous because of radio and TV, but when I was a child (40 years ago) old people in the alp valley I grew up in still used the local dialect, and it is way more difficult to understand to other French than Québécois is. It’s closer to modern Italian but still far from it.
It’s pretty dead now. I only know a few sentences and child songs.
Even with radio and TV, and easier travel, there are still a lot of interesting dialects, maybe not within France itself, but Belgian French is different, so is Swiss French. Sub-Saharan African French is really interesting because it has a vocabulary that’s more similar to France French, but some of the pronunciation is more different than Quebecois French. And then there’s Haiti where they speak a Creole that has a lot of French-sounding words in it, but can’t really be understood by French speakers.
When I played Cyberpunk 2077 and realized the voodoo boys spoke creole I was totally hyped and really wanted to join them. As the missions with them are early in the game I imagined there was a possibility to choose a gang (you can’t). Because of that every time they tried to get rid of me, and you are really disposable to them, I always choose dialog lines to play it down, saying it was okay.
That made me roleplay the most naïve and dumb person of the world in a universe that really don’t call for that.
Even if you’re trying to go for something that the devs didn’t intend to be possible, those are still memorable moments in games. I like it best when devs allow for something unusual like that, but even if they don’t, a game that feels immersive enough that that might be possible is fun.
Ha I enjoyed that tale. What happened after?
We didn’t date but became friends. One or two years after we met, with a group of friends we went to Quebec with her and stayed at her family cabin that was very far north of Chicoutimi, near a small lake, and it was breathtaking.
There was another confusion though. She referred to going on the lake on the “ponton” (pier in French from the metropole). But we saw the lake and there was no pier on it. She was in fact referring to the kind of boat they have to chill on the lake. It was more some kind of draft : square, flat, with a lot of room to chill and no focus on going un a particular direction, which makes sense. It looks more like a pier than a boat, it was just not on the water when she talked about it.
Ah interesting. I think that’s what we call a “pontoon” which is just a floating…platform, that you move with an oar. Well, the barrel things under it keeping it afloat are the pontoons.
Languages. Funny things.
A pontoon has two hulls (stacks of barrels). If it has three, it’s a tri-toon 🤓
How deep can this language hole take us!
We call them pontoon boats in English.
Great, now I’m imagining a warm French slip.
Combines à grand-manches
Imagine being less likeable than the French and by choice as well.
décomplexé
Duolingo only has Brazilian Portuguese
Brazil has more people than Portugal (213 million v 11 million). France has more population than Quebec (69 million (66 million for Metropolitan France) v 9 million)
Is KFC called that in France? It’s specifically called KFC in the states and not ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’ because the chicken is not actually from Kentucky.
Colonel Sanders was not a real Colonel, but he was in the Army. He was a cook at Fort Lewis in Washington state during WWII. To feed the massive groups of soldiers, they needed to make food faster, so they engineered up new industrial scale pressure cookers to make a huge amount of fried chicken at once. After the war he was able to get a bunch of the machines, and move back to Kentucky and start a business. The “colonel’s secret recipe” was literally just using this Army surplus tech from WWII to start a bunch of chicken restaurants. My point is, really it ought to be called Washington Fried Chicken.
Wasn’t the first KFC in Utah though?
The cooking style is “Kentucky Fried” not that the chickens are from Kentucky.
Correct, outside Kentucky it’s just “Glistening Fried Poultry”
Yeah, it’s just the logo, no one uses the full name.
Stop signs in France say “STOP” but in Quebec they say “ARRÊT”
And you can tell where someone is from in Quebec with how they pronounce “ARRÊT”
That’s because France is part of the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals
The Vienna Convention allows you to use either STOP or your native version. Likewise, you can either use a red octagonal sign, or a red upside-down triangle inside a red circle. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildtafel_der_Stoppschilder (that list only seems to exist in German Wikipedia)
What? I thought the point of the octagon was so you can also tell its a stop sign from the other side and always know who has priority. Yet some countries say, nah circle is good. Speed limit? Circle. Stop? Circle.
They also translate “parking” as “stationnement” and “weekend” as “fin de semaine” while the French just lamely use the English words
Fin de semaine in France means end of the work week (Thursday Friday) whereas fin de semaine in Quebec means weekend.
That’s not uncommon for other countries tbf
I like to dunk on Quebec as much as the next guy but that’s actually based.
I think it has spilled into the rest of Canada too. I just spent a week in Alberta and every little thing that said “stop” also said “arrêt”. But the only obvious French speakers I encountered were either tourists or government officials being intentionally accommodating.
On a more serious note I think Canadian bilingualism might exaggerate this effect. Every sign and product package is printed in both languages so in a way or makes sense to spell things out in full English and full French. i.e. It would be kinda weird to print English alongside some kind of nonstandard Franglish.
In Eastern Ontario you’ll see these signs along the highway that spell some safety message. They’ll have sometimes 2 or 3 in a row to fully tell you the thing in english. Then you’ll get the same signs again explaining it in french.
Packaging having both languages on it is a federal level legal requirement, since we are bilingual. However, the stop signs are more a regional thing. If there is a francophone population in the area, and you’re not in Quebec, you might see both on a sign. In my home province, we have the dual language signs wherever the French speaking population is large enough to warrant it, but everywhere else has English only.
Yes that was my understanding. That’s precisely why I shared my experience in Alberta, where I did not expect any substantial francophone population. Maybe that assumption was just wrong?
In general, I’d say you’re right that Alberta wouldn’t have a large population of francophones. But, especially in anglophone provinces, French speakers tend to live in French communities.
Like in my province, you could carve out ~80% of the land and have about 97% English speakers to 3% French speakers. But the remaining 20% is nearly 90% French speakers.
Fun fact did you know that most French speakers are not French themselves?
The average French speaker is from one of France’s old African colonies.
Imagine losing your national identity to the people you oppressed and they don’t care about having it.
99% of English speakers aren’t English. Same thing with Spanish.
They literally went from an empire where the Sun never set to be relegated to an island smaller than Michigan… and they don’t even own the whole island, they have to share it with like 3ish other governments.
It was the British Empire, not the English Empire. The union was formed partially because Scotland was flat broke from failing to colonise what’s now Panama and needed access to the English economy while England wanted to prevent a perennial French threat on its northern border.
Also Americans are in no position to speak about imperial decline at the moment! Iran has a nasty chance of becoming their Suez unless competent leadership is restored pretty sharpish in my view.
The empire was British, not English, so those other countries that the English “share” the island with were a part of that.
What?
Common sense:
Surely no one could be more up their own ass about being French than the French.Quebec, for some reason:

Tabernac!
Did you mean for this to resemble a polar bear up its own ass, or was that just lucky coincidence? Either way, it’s a perfect use of the meme.
Honestly, lucky coincidence. I just thought it was funny the bear was speaking French.
















