Vol vers Montréal — Flight to Montréal

Whose French is "le français"?

Marie-Ève's joke carries the whole block. Something like 300 million people speak French, a minority of them in France, and the question of which varieties count as proper is live, unsettled, and felt. The historical weight sits with Paris. France has an official language body, the Académie française, founded in 1635; French schooling has long treated a single standard as the goal; and for most of the twentieth century the broadcast voice of French was a Parisian one. That produced a real hierarchy, and in Québec it produced something more complicated still: a generation taught, sometimes explicitly, that the way their parents spoke was a corrupted French. Marie-Ève's mother saying 'on parle mal' is not invented. It is a recognisable attitude among older Québécois, and the resentment of it drove much of the cultural assertion of the 1960s and after. The counter-position is now at least as strong, and in Québec it is the mainstream one: that Québécois French is a complete, internally consistent variety with four centuries of its own history, its own standard register used by its own broadcasters and courts, and no obligation to answer to Paris. Linguists broadly describe varieties rather than ranking them, and will tell you that 'speaking badly' is not a coherent linguistic claim about a whole speech community. The people who disagree are not usually linguists but speakers, including speakers of the variety being judged. This course takes no position on which French a learner ought to admire, and it will not tell you that one accent is correct. What it will tell you is practical. First, the standard written French of Québec, Belgium, Senegal and France is very nearly the same language — a Montréal newspaper and a Paris one differ far less than their radio does. Second, you learnt a Paris-flavoured French and that is an accident of this course, not a verdict. Third, and this is the part that will serve you: commenting on how somebody speaks their own language is a far bigger move than it feels like. 'Vous avez un accent' said to a Québécois by a learner trained in Paris lands badly and deservedly so. Ask about words, not about correctness — 'comment vous dites, vous ?' opens a conversation that 'ah, ici on dit autrement' closes. If you want to hear the range before block A begins, Radio-Canada's news is Québec's careful register, and almost any Québécois comedy or téléréalité is not. The gap between those two is wider than the gap between either and France Inter, which is itself the point.