Did you know that French is present in each of the continents around the world? French is the official language in more than 29 countries, not counting the rest of the countries where it is spoken as a second language, with approximately 300 million people in the world. Consequently, the use of the language can vary according to the territory, in terms of words, colloquial expressions, accents and so on. For example, although Canadian French and French French share the same grammatical rules, the pronunciation varies quite a bit, since it has a little more influence from French due to the proximity of their territory. In this sense, as expected, there are also marked cultural differences, because Quebec has a greater influence from North American countries than from Europe's own French culture.
On this occasion, we bring you a couple of examples of these differences, especially lexical differences between the French spoken in Canada, specifically in Quebec, and the French of France.
The weekend: curiously in this difference, we find that in Quebec we use “La fin de semaine” and in the French of France “Le Week-end”. Contrary to what we could conclude from the influences that each country has, in France we stick with Anglicism.
How funny! How fun!: while in the previous one the assumptions of the influence of American culture were contrary, in this case, Canada shows us the use of Anglicisms or borrowings from English with the expression “C'est fun!” while in France we say “C'est marrant”
Shopping: In French French, we use the expression “Faire les courses” to refer to shopping while in Canadian French we say “Magasinier”. Here we could assume that the last term is due to the fact that in French we call stores “Magasins” and that this was transformed to become a verb.
We hope you liked our article. If you want to learn more about this topic and are interested in Canadian French, whatever your purposes, we invite you to participate in our “Discover Quebec” workshops so that you can expand your knowledge on this proposed topic.
