Canadian French
| Canadian French | |
|---|---|
| Français canadien | |
| Native to | Canada (primarily Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia, but present throughout the country); smaller numbers in emigrant communities in New England (especially Maine and Vermont), United States |
Native speakers | 7,300,000 (2011 census)[1] |
Early forms | |
French alphabet) French Braille | |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Canada |
Recognised minority language in | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
| IETF | fr-CA |
Canadian French (
In 2011, the total number of native French speakers in Canada was around 7.3 million (22% of the entire population), while another 2 million spoke it as a second language. At the federal level, it has official status alongside English. At the provincial level, French is the sole official language of Quebec as well as one of two official languages of New Brunswick and jointly official (derived from its federal legal status) in Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Government services are offered in French at select localities in Manitoba, Ontario (through the French Language Services Act) and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the country, depending largely on the proximity to Quebec and/or French Canadian influence on any given region. In New Brunswick, all government services must be available in both official languages.
Dialects and varieties
Quebec French is spoken in Quebec. Closely related varieties are spoken by Francophone communities in Ontario, Western Canada and the New England region of the United States, differing only from Quebec French primarily by their greater conservatism. The term Laurentian French has limited applications as a collective label for all these varieties, and Quebec French has also been used for the entire dialect group. The overwhelming majority of francophone Canadians speak this dialect.
Newfoundland French is spoken by a small population on the Port au Port Peninsula of Newfoundland. It is endangered—both Quebec French and Acadian French are now more widely spoken among Newfoundland Francophones than the distinctive peninsular dialect.
.
Sub-varieties
There are two main sub-varieties of Canadian French.
Historical usage
The term "Canadian French" was formerly used to refer specifically to Quebec French and the closely related varieties of Ontario and Western Canada descended from it.[5] This is presumably because Canada and Acadia were distinct parts of New France, and also of British North America, until 1867. The term is no longer usually deemed to exclude Acadian French.
Use of anglicisms
 | This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2020) |
The term
According to some, French spoken in Canada includes many anglicisms. The "Banque de dépannage linguistique" (Language Troubleshooting Database) by the Office québécois de la langue française[7] distinguishes between different kinds of anglicisms:[8]
- Complete anglicisms are words or groups of loan wordsfrom the English language. The form is often exactly the same as in English (e.g., "glamour", "short", and "sweet"), but sometimes there is a slight adjustment to the French language (e.g., "drabe", which comes from the English word "drab").
- Hybrid anglicisms are new words, formed by the addition of a French element to an English word. This element (a suffix, for instance) sometimes replaces a similar element of the English word. "Booster" is an example of hybrid anglicism; it is made up of the English verb "to boost", to which the French suffix –er is added.
- Semantic anglicisms are French words used in a sense which exists in English but not in French. Examples include ajourner ("postpone") in the sense of "to have a break", pathétique in the sense of "miserable" or "pitiful", plancher ("floor/surface") in the sense of "floor" (level of a building), and préjudice ("harm/injury") in the sense of "(unfavorable) opinion".
- Syntactic anglicisms are those relating to the word order of a prepositions and conjunctions. The expression "un bon dix minutes" ("a good ten minutes"), for instance, comes from the English language; the more conventional French wording would be "dix bonnes minutes". The use of the preposition pour ("for") after the verbs demander ("ask [for]") and chercher ("search/look [for]") is also a syntactic anglicism.
- Morphological anglicisms are literal translations (or calques) of the English forms. With this kind of borrowing, every element comes from French, but what results from it as a whole reproduces, completely or partly, the image transmitted in English. The word technicalité, for instance, is formed under English influence and does not exist in standard French (which would instead use the phrasing "détail technique"). À l'année longue ("all year long"), appel conférence ("conference call"), and prix de liste ("list price") are other morphological examples of anglicisms.
- Finally, sentencial anglicisms are loan idioms peculiar to the English language. The expressions ajouter l'insulte à l'injure ("add insult to injury") and sonner une cloche ("ring a bell") are sentencial anglicisms.
Academic,
See also
- Official bilingualism in Canada
- French language in Canada
- Association québécoise de linguistique
- History of French
- Languages of Canada
- Quebec French lexicon
- French language in the United States
- CSA keyboard – the official keyboard layout of Canada
- Canadian Language Museum
- Maillardville
- French colonization of the Americas
Notes and references
Notes
- ^ French (Canada) at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ a b Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian (2022-05-24). "Glottolog 4.8 - Oil". Glottolog. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Archived from the original on 2023-11-11. Retrieved 2023-11-11.
- ^ Ethnologue report for Canada
- ^ Geddes, James (1908). Study of the Acadian-French language spoken on the north shore of the Baie-des-Chaleurs. Halle: Niemeyer; Wittmann, Henri (1995) "Grammaire comparée des variétés coloniales du français populaire de Paris du 17e siècle et origines du français québécois." in Fournier, Robert & Henri Wittmann. Le français des Amériques. Trois-Rivières: Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières, 281–334.[1]
- ^ Francard and Latin, in Le régionalisme lexical, write:
- "Le français du Québec a rayonné en Ontario et dans l'ouest du Canada, de même qu'en Nouvelle-Angleterre. [...] Le français québécois et le français acadien peuvent être regroupés sous l'appellation plus large de français canadien2, laquelle englobe aussi le français ontarien et le français de l'Ouest canadien. Ces deux derniers possèdent des traits caractéristiques qui leur sont propres aujourd'hui dans l'ensemble canadien et qui s'expliquent surtout par un phénomène de conservatisme, mais il s'agit de variétés qui sont historiquement des prolongements du français québécois.
- 2Il faut noter ici que le terme de «français canadien» avait autrefois un sens plus restreint, désignant le français du Québec et les variétés qui s'y rattachent directement, d'où l'emploi à cette époque de «canadianisme» pour parler d'un trait caractéristique du français du Québec."
- ^ Robert Fournier & Henri Wittmann. 1995. Le français des Amériques. Trois-Rivières: Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières.
- ^ "Banque de dépannage linguistique - Office québécois de la langue française".
- ^ Office québécois de la langue française. "Anglicismes". Archived from the original on 14 May 2011. Retrieved 5 May 2011.
References
- The lexical basis of grammatical borrowing: a Prince Edward Island French
- Language in Canada. Edwards, John R.
- Canadian French for better travel. Montreal: Ulysses Travel Guides. 2004. ISBN 2-89464-720-4. Archived from the originalon October 19, 2021.
Further reading
- Darnell, Regna, ed. (1971). Linguistic Diversity in Canadian Society, in Sociolinguistics Series, 1. Edmonton, Alta.: Linguistic Research. Without ISBN or SBN
External links
