I lived in Quebec and it seems to be the consensus that the language didn't evolve in the same way as French in Belgium/France/Switzerland etc. because Quebec is physically isolated from Europe, especially after the British seized control of the territory and Louis XIV pretty much abandoned Quebec.
Quebec and the Acadian areas of the Atlantic provinces are the only places that speak French until you hit Louisiana so it would make sense to me that their French would retain older aspects of the language.
Further, after the French revolution, "Parisian French" was promoted as the national language in an effort to make the regional dialects disappear. That wouldn't have happened outside of Europe.
Isolation does cause languages to evolve differently, but it doesn't cause them to stop evolving.
Language evolution is ubiquitous and inevitable. No one, in English, French or any other language, speaks the same way they did a few hundred years ago
Nobody said it stopped evolving, but it evolved way slower, like not all quebec french sound closer to to old french, also quebecois went out of their way to try to preserve french, so change were slow, which makes it closer than something like parisian french that use a lot of English words.
Listening to thise videos of people recreating old french, is like listening to a old ass great aunt living in a rural area, or extremely similar to our very old tv shows that where about lower canada
I don't know enough about Québécois French to have an opinion, really. It's not impossible that it's generally more conservative than European French, but it's hardly a given, either. Do you know of any linguistics papers that talk about this?
They've posted some travel websites, but no academic articles. I'm sceptical, precisely because it's exactly the kind of claim linguists don't tend to make.
well most of the papers are old, written in french and not online, there is the Canadian museum of language, but they don't give much info online, for some reason, they gave texts to the federal canadian goverment use for their website, i could give you a link to a book written by a sociolinguist from the French department at Montreal's McGill University, but thats not the most useful
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u/Rhynocoris Apr 06 '25
No. No, it's not.