The younger Québécois generation can often use their own native terms and French terms alternately. "Bitte" is not used in Quebec, though French terms such as this are recognized more and more. In France, the term "bitte" refers to a man's phallus. Hence, barring rather than locking the door. In Quebec, canneberge usually designates the fruit itself as well as the cranberry juice, whereas atoca usually refers to the cranberry jelly traditionally eaten with the Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey.įrench colonists would use a crossbar to secure the entrance to their dwelling. For measuring area, a square (English) mile contains 640 acres, but 512 arpents. Land was traditionally surveyed to either 40 or 80 arpents back from a river or bayou (1.5 or 3 miles). Here, arpent is used both as a measure of length as well as area. In Louisiana, an arpent is still a legal unit of measurement, and is not the same as an acre. In France "vacuum cleaner" is "aspirateur". The adjectival suffix - euse is added to verbal stems to form "the machine that verbs." For example, laver → laveuse "washing machine" balayer → balayeuse "vacuum cleaner" (but "streetsweeper" in France). Some suffixes are more productive in Quebec than in France, in particular the adjectival suffix - eux, which has a somewhat pejorative meaning: téter → téteux (thick, dumb, nitpicking, nerd), niaiser → niaiseux (foolish, irritating) obstiner → ostineux (stubborn) pot → poteux (a user or dealer of marijuana). This sparked a fair amount of debate and is rather on the outer edge of techniques for nonsexist writing in Quebec French. Official government and state titles and designations always have official, mandated French equivalent terms for each gender.Īlso, rather than following the rule that the masculine includes the feminine, it is relatively common to create doublets, especially in polemical speech: Québécoises et Québécois, tous et toutes, citoyens et citoyennes.Īs an isolated anecdote, a Quebec labour union once decided to promulgate an epicene neologism on the model of fidèle, calling itself the Fédération des professionnèles, rather than use either professionnels (masculine only) or professionnels et professionnelles (masculine and feminine). Many of these have been formally recommended by the Office québécois de la langue française and adopted by society at large. Forms that would be seen as highly unusual or stridently feminist in France are commonplace in Quebec, such as la docteure, la professeure, la première ministre, la gouverneure générale, and so forth. This is done in order to avoid having to refer to a woman with a masculine noun, and thereby seeming to suggest that a particular profession is primarily masculine. There is a much greater tendency to generalize feminine markers among nouns referring to professions. Gender-neutral usage įormal Quebec French also has a very different approach to gender-neutral language than Metropolitan French. Borrowing from English is politically sensitive in Quebec and tends to be socially discouraged.
In France, they often have a very different meaning for example 'le smoking' for 'tuxedo'. In Quebec, borrowed English words tend to have the same meaning as the English word. Many English words and calques have also been integrated in Quebec French, although less than in France. Quebec French profanity uses references to Catholic liturgical terminology, rather than the references to prostitution that are more common in France. New words were also created for Quebec specialties that do not exist in Europe.Īs with any two regional variants, there is an abundance of slang terms found in Quebec that are not found in France. Many differences that exist between Quebec French and European French arise from the preservation of certain forms that are today archaic in Europe. Subsequent lists have been published regularly since then. This list especially contained imperial units and words from aboriginal languages. However, starting in the 1960s, it agreed to the use of words then called "well-formed Canadianisms (canadianismes de bon aloi)," that either are regional in nature (such as names of plants and animals), have been used since before the Conquest, or are justified in their origin and are considered to be equivalent or "better" than the standard equivalent.Ī very small list of words was published in 1969, mainly containing words that were archaic in France, but still common in Quebec. The Office québécois de la langue française believes that neither morphology nor syntax should be different between Québécois and Metropolitan French, and even that phonetic differences should be kept to a minimum.
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