I speak French but for the life of me cannot understand the lyrics from the band "La Chicane". They are from Montreal and to actually understand their texts I had to read the lyrics. Stroll is from Montreal (Latifi I believe is from Toronto). Never heard him speak French, but if it is anything like La Chicane, well then ahem.
I can well believe that; French Canadian is quite distinct from mainstream French. I met a Canadian girl in Paris in the 70s . She was from Trois-Rivières (Quebec), and people could hardly understand her. Not only the pronunciation was different, together with the intonation, but even some of the vocabulary was different.
As I travel around the world I find it amazing how many people think that French is spoken widely in Canada. While French is an official language of Canada and requires bi-lingual packaging in the whole country, it is only spoken in the province of Quebec which makes up less than 10% of the area of the country. Children in school are taught correct European French but that is miles away from what is spoken in Quebec. The closest you will find is in Montreal but go as little as 100km out of the city and you are hit with endless dialects known as 'Patois' which will leave even the best speaking France resident totally lost. And that ends your Canadian education component for the day Back to Stroll bashing
Thanks for that. So I'm guessing "La Chicane" sings in Patois. When I listen to French songs from artists of France/Paris I pretty much understand it all. Way different.
You just had to liste to Gilles speak to understand it's a very strange french!..as he used to say "Cést ma job"
Ha-ha, that’s a typical “franglais”—mix of French and English—expression as spoken here daily by the people on the street. But you won’t hear this on, for example, the news broadcasts which are done in pretty much proper, neutral, French—minus the TF1 accent. Compare this with news or sports reporting from Italy where it seems every second word is an English term for something can be easily communicated in Italian. And BTW, “patois” is a generic term for any sort of dialect. The term for the Quebec way of speaking is “joual”, with the origins of this term—and a bit of a dissertation—explained here: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joual And back to the topic of Stroll, I’m not sure I ever heard him speak French, Québécois or otherwise, and wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t speak it at all.
Gilles spoke like a French professor compared to his brother, LOL. Here’s “frère” Jacques (aka l’oncle) explaining his snowmobile accident and the French guest on the show has no idea what he’s saying. https://www.facebook.com/RadioCanada/videos/jacques-villeneuve-le-color%C3%A9-casse-cou/934379603272976/