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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

As the resident of a northeastern US state, relatives on one side of my family grew up speaking French, so naturally I took French in high school. I was embarrassed when I still couldn't speak French with the family and had to resort to English when visiting Montreal.

I was, however, vindicated later in life when I visited France and was able to get by without English.

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AIUI the Quebecois understand Metropolitan French (from movies, literature, etc.), it's just not what they actually speak. Canadian and Cajun French, again AIUI, are mostly derivative from Norman and Breton, which were never really the same as Parisian, and the emigrants who defined the language left before the French state was able to force Parisian language onto everyone in the country. It's not as far removed as, say, Provencal (which is in some respects closer to Catalan), but definitely not the same as Parisian, and they've had centuries of isolation from the developments in the mother country, during which they've been exposed to a torrent of English (and American English at that; don't @ me, Canadians, we speak the same English and it's distinctly not British, ANZ, or Indian, even if we spell and pronounce a few things differently).

That's a great breakdown. To my ears, one of the big differences in Canadian vs. Metropolitan French is that the former is very much in the throat, while the latter is in the nose.

Standing in line for currency exchange in Montreal behind a French couple almost broke my brain as I tried to listen into their conversation with the worker.

I don’t know how true this is, but I have read that the French view of Quebec is “they aren’t French people in America, they’re Americans who happen to speak French.”

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