As we reminisced, the sound of the local accent drifted around us – and I thought about something I had recently heard: that while the French spoken in Quebec might not sound as romantic or sweet to the ear as modern Parisian gold standard French, the way they speak Quebecois is actually closer to the French pronunciation used by 17th century aristocrats – even the king. I grew up in Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s, when Anglophones, along with the French from France, derided the harsh accent of Quebec French, comparing it to the quacking of ducks. I myself was always deeply embarrassed by the company of my English-speaking classmates at the French immersion school. My so-called experts and teachers, who came from France and Morocco, said that the relaxed Quebec accent was shameful, that it made a mockery of Moliere’s language. As it turns out, the famous 17th-century playwright was probably more like a modern Quebecois – than a modern Parisian – than they knew. I was actually shocked when someone mentioned this to me a few weeks earlier over lunch at a cafe in North Hatley, a quaint village in the gently mountainous Eastern Townships, southeast of Montreal. I knew that Quebecois French had retained many remnants of “le français du roy” or “the king’s French”, especially in their vocabulary, but I drew the line at pronunciation. “There’s no way Louis XIV said ‘foot, voilaou’ or ‘toé et moé’!” I had said this skeptically, as I compared them to the more commonly accepted pronunciations of pas, voilà and toi et moi. But there are logical linguistic and historical reasons why Quebec French is different from French (what linguists call “regular” or “neutralized” French).
