Québec / Canadian French

Features specific to French as spoken in Québec and across Canada: pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar that differ from standard metropolitan French.

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• Québec / Canadian French, overviewQuébec French is a full regional standard of the French language with its own pronunciation, vocabulary, and informal grammar, mutually intelligible with European French and ranging from formal usage to the vernacular known as joual.
• Québec pronunciation: vowel oppositions, laxing, and diphthongizationQuébec French keeps vowel oppositions that have largely merged in France (patte vs pâte, brin vs brun), laxes the high vowels /i y u/ in closed syllables, and diphthongizes long vowels in informal speech.
• Québec pronunciation: affrication of /t/ and /d/ (tu → /tsy/, dire → /dzir/)In Québec French the stops /t/ and /d/ are released as the affricates [ts] and [dz] before the high front vowels /i/ and /y/ and their glides, so tu is [tsy] and dire is [dzir].
• Québec everyday vocabulary (char, magasiner, dépanneur)Québec French shares its core lexicon with European French but differs in hundreds of everyday words, some preserved from older usage, some local coinages, and some with shifted meanings, the best known being char (car), magasiner (to shop), dépanneur (corner store) and the meal names déjeuner, dîner and souper.
• Québec anglicisms and calquesContact with English gives Québec French a layer of casual borrowings and loan translations such as c'est le fun, canceller and tomber en amour, yet the same variety often keeps or coins French where Europe borrows English, as with courriel, clavardage, stationnement and arrêt; the result is strongly register-dependent and shaped by deliberate language planning.
• Québec interrogative particle -tuIn informal Québec (and broader Canadian and Laurentian) French, a yes/no question can be marked by attaching the particle -tu to the verb, as in Tu viens-tu? or C'est-tu loin?; this -tu is a question marker derived from the old inversion ending, not the pronoun tu, and works with any subject.
• Québec grammatical features (a survey)Québec French follows the same standard grammar as European French in writing, but informal speech shows a cluster of distinctive morphosyntactic features, including the reinforced pronouns nous autres / vous autres / eux autres, on for nous, the yes/no question particle -tu, sentence-final là, and several verb and preposition patterns such as barrer / débarrer.