Why quebec speaks french

This website uses tracking technologies to learn how our visitors interact with our site so that we can improve our services and provide visitors with valuable content. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our privacy policy. English or French Language for Business in Quebec? Contribution by Peg Kirkpatrick. Peg is a perpetual traveler, perennial expat, and cultural sponge. She and her husband Gary have lived and traveled extensively throughout Europe, with a short stint in Panama as a Peace Corps Volunteer with the over 50 years old group.

Recent adventures include Russia, Lavia, and Lithuania. As a Global Lead Researcher, Peg loves providing much-needed resources and a fresh perspective to families during their global relocations. Previous Post. Next Post. Continue reading more articles. Colonizers quickly established steadfast settlements, and French was imposed as the lingua franca to the detriment of indigenous dialects.

The French elite left the province, overseas trade ceased and the teaching of French declined, while an English-speaking minority came to rule over politics and the economy.

After the Canadian Confederation was established in , Canadian French, which until then was a pretty standard mix of Parisian French and other France-based dialects, started to evolve more independently.

At the end of the s, industrialization prompted much of the rural population to move to predominantly English-speaking cities. Common French speech began to mingle with English. Chase, a McGill graduate student who moved from Alberta to Montreal for several years, would agree, although in part due to the McGill bubble, his French proficiency remained relatively low.

While there are quite a few potential exceptions, the employer still has to prove that their staff really needs to speak English if anybody complains about it. This means Quebec can be a tough place for a casual move like a working holiday or gap year, because many casual jobs like bartending, or working in a restaurant, are completely off the table. I arrived in Montreal with a bunch of experience as a server and six solid years of French education.

Yet I still handed out over 40 CVs to restaurants before getting a job offer. This breaking up and elongating of vowels is very distinct to the French spoken in Canada. Take these for example:. The third major difference lies in the nasal vowels, of which there are four in French. In Continental French, the nasal U has disappeared and been replaced with the nasal A sound, leaving Continental French with three nasal vowels.

Laurentian French has preserved the fourth nasal vowel. The rest of the nasal vowels in Laurentian French are more, for lack of a better word, nasal-y. The rules are just a bit less formal.