Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Why Québec translates what France borrows
The reversal in this lesson looks like a quirk and is in fact the most direct expression of Québec's situation: roughly eight million French speakers on a continent of some four hundred million English speakers, sharing a long border and an economy with the largest of them. That produces a different relationship to English borrowing. In France, an English word is a fashion — it signals modernity, it costs nothing, and the language is in no doubt about its own position. In Québec, the same borrowing has historically looked like a step in a process with an obvious end, and resisting it has been a deliberate, organised project. The Office québécois de la langue française, created in 1961, coins and promotes French alternatives, and a good number of them took: 'courriel' for email is now standard in Québec and has spread to France, 'clavardage' for online chat, 'baladodiffusion' for podcasting. Others did not. The institution is frequently mocked, including inside Québec, and is also frequently effective. The language-policy framework itself — the Charter of the French Language, usually called Bill 101, and the rules it sets for signage, schooling and workplaces — is the subject of lesson 60, where it gets the treatment it deserves rather than a paragraph. What belongs here is just the linguistic consequence: the deliberate translations are concentrated exactly where language is public and institutional, which is why Québec has 'stationnement' on its signs and 'chum' in its kitchens. Intimate, spoken borrowings survive because nobody legislates a kitchen. Two practical notes for a visitor. First, nobody will correct your 'parking' or your 'week-end' — these are understood everywhere, and Québécois speakers are entirely used to hearing French French. Using the local word is a courtesy that gets noticed, not a requirement. Second, and more useful: in Montréal the greeting 'bonjour-hi' is common in shops and is an invitation to answer in whichever language you prefer. Answering 'bonjour' gets you served in French. That greeting is also itself politically contested, which tells you how little of this is really about shopping.