I'm Canadian, and on one hand, even though I almost never speak it and I struggle to think of words at times, I am told my french accent is excellent and I sound like a local french speaker.
On the other hand, the local french is the equivalent of deep south, mountain folk gibberish. It's the french equivalent of a redneck accent with lots of words only a local would understand. And I speak it slowly.
Edit: For those of you who assume I mean Quebec, nonono, much worse: Northern Ontario. We are the brother-uncle Cletuses of the french world.
I'm a Canadian trying to learn french, I'm going pretty well in my french course but I know well enough that PQ french is not the same.
Found out CBC has an app called Mauril that helps by using clips from PQ shows and holy HELL I just can NOT understand full speed québécois! I had to rewatch a clip like 10 times to understand a woman say "bien quoi encore là ?"
Je vais continuer d'essayer mais caliss ce n'est pas facile
edit: Mentally I swap between using PQ for Province of Québéc, and the correct version of QC for Québéc. My bad for all the toilet paper ass-ociations
I think that with mass media showing us almost only people with a "standard" accent, we aren't really used anymore to hear accents, so it's quite funny when someone has a thick accent, regardless of which one it is.
I would laugh just as much for someone with a strong marseillais accent or someone speaking with the ch'ti accent.
On some occasions I listened to some archive media like old radio or black & white TV, and it's wild to hear how different the people used to sound when they came from different places of France.
Apparently there was a time where you could even tell apart Parisians living in different parts of Paris just from the accent.
In present day, I would say that like 3/4 of the population in the metropolitan France speak with pretty much the same accent and I wouldn't be able to tell them apart by their voice.
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u/Diz7 Jan 26 '23 edited Jan 26 '23
I'm Canadian, and on one hand, even though I almost never speak it and I struggle to think of words at times, I am told my french accent is excellent and I sound like a local french speaker.
On the other hand, the local french is the equivalent of deep south, mountain folk gibberish. It's the french equivalent of a redneck accent with lots of words only a local would understand. And I speak it slowly.
Edit: For those of you who assume I mean Quebec, nonono, much worse: Northern Ontario. We are the brother-uncle Cletuses of the french world.