The future of French

[Sizen]

Not so much corrections as just other points of view! As always with this sort of thing, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.

There are examples like this where the gentleman speaks with a very clean and understandable Quebec accent, which even for an untrained ear would be easy to recognize as québécois simply based on the use of the alveolar ‘r’ which was very common in Montreal earlier last century (one of my great aunts still speaks like this!) or even the pronounced ‘h’ in hache. This is then followed by some French that is, quite frankly, so far into the Atlantic that the sound waves might start to look Hexagonal if you squint. It is still clearly Quebec French, however.

There’s likely always been a lot of diversity on TV despite efforts to follow some sort of standard.

[kleene*star]

What do you all think about the future of French? I've seen such varying projections, everything from "it's a dying language" to its potentially being one of the top two or three most spoken languages in the world in 40 or 50 years.

Just chiming in to say that the idea that French is a dying language is cuckoo bananas.

[s_allard]

Just like the other aspects of language pronunciation is always evolving. When you hear a recording of a person, let’s say in French but it probably applies to all languages, if you are knowledgeable enough, you can usually tell their age, where they were born and grew up, their ethnic background if relevant, how much formal education they have, their social class and the nature of their profession in terms of language use.

We know that the British are acutely aware of the significance of accents and especially the role of what they call posh language.

When we speak about the evolution of the pronunciation of Quebec French, you have to look at past and contemporary sociological and demographic changes. One major factor that comes to mind is the relatively recent expansion of formal education. This is important for two reasons. First, it exposes students to the formal language both written and spoken. Second, it brings students together and induces a certain homogenization of language.

As something of an aside, I want to point out that in Québec universities immigrants from France and Belgium have always been a large component of the teaching staff. What we see today is that the older faculty will often be of European origin whereas the younger staff is more likely Québécois.

Similarly, there was a time when France or Belgium was the preferred destination for doctoral studies because there were limited opportunities in Quebec.

I want to also mention the importance of French-speaking immigration from Europe, North Africa and subsaharan Africa in the dynamic of language change. There are around 60,000 French citizens living in Montreal. Two of the most prestigious elementary and high schools (Stanislas, Marie-de-France) cater to this market, but not exclusively, by following a curriculum from France.

When you put together all of these factors, and others that I have not mentioned, you get a melting pot of accents that you can observe in the mainstream media and in the wild west of social media. So, while we see remnants of the carefully self-monitored snobbish Radio-Canada accent, there are other radio and television stations that have other speaking forms on full display.

By the way, if you ever want to hear what older and catholic religious speaking styles in Québécois French sound like, listen to this radio station :
https://www.radiovm.com/

[DaveAgain]

Just like the other aspects of language pronunciation is always evolving. When you hear a recording of a person, let’s say in French but it probably applies to all languages, if you are knowledgeable enough, you can usually tell their age, where they were born and grew up, their ethnic background if relevant, how much formal education they have, their social class and the nature of their profession in terms of language use.

We know that the British are acutely aware of the significance of accents and especially the role of what they call posh language.

I was a little surprised the other day to discover there are posh american accents too! A documentary told me that the USA public thought Katherine Hepburn was too posh

By the way, if you ever want to hear what older and catholic religious speaking styles in Québécois French sound like, listen to this radio station :
https://www.radiovm.com/

Thanks for the link.

[emk]

I was a little surprised the other day to discover there are posh american accents too!

Oh, absolutely! There's an old Boston accent which is very posh, famously mocked with the phrase "Pahk the cah at Havahd Yahd." Or the song that Ivy League marching bands used to sing to make fun of Harvard:

H-AY-AH with a V!
V-AY-AH with a D!

There's also a less "posh" version of this accent, which shifts thɐ "ar" pronunciation from a long /a/ to something around /ɐ/ or maybe /ɑ/. I had a Bostonian friend who used "Pahk the cah at Stah Mahket" for that one.

The other oddity of some northern New England accents is weird rhoticity. You have:

• idea → ideer
• spa → spar
• Amanda → Amander
• Augusta → Auguster

But you also have:

• lobster → lobstah / lobstuh
• here → hee-uh
• there → they-uh

The latter two are either a vowel glide into a schwa, or an actual syllable break, depending. And the "a" → "er" transformation doesn't just occur before a word beginning with a vowel, so it's not the better-known "intrusive r". It's actually fixed in those positions. I was probably 12 or 13 by the time I realized "spa" wasn't actually spelled "spar."

Here's a demonstration of the Maine version of many of these features (I recognize almost all of this, except "all stove up" and a couple of other expressions). But if you combine some of these elements differently, and shift the vowels around, you can sound like John F. Kennedy. Who was absolutely very posh.

When you put together all of these factors, and others that I have not mentioned, you get a melting pot of accents that you can observe in the mainstream media and in the wild west of social media.

Oh, yeah, Quebec is absolutely amazing for anyone who's interested in accents. That was actually one of my favorite parts of Les Années lumière—they interviewed scientists and students from all around Quebec. The science reporting was always interesting, but the accent diversity was fanastic. Even if the hosts were trying to stick to some of Radio Canada standard, the people being interviewed weren't, and they'd get through a lot of interviews in 2 hours. Honestly, just for the science alone this is one of my favorite podcasts—there is a lot of fantastic work going on in Quebec.

[Cainntear]

And yeah, "Parisian" might have been a wrong choice on my part

Or it might not have been.
The origin of the term "Parisian" to describe standard French goes back to the time when there was much more variation of language within France, and the Parisian tongue gained importance due to the royal court being there.

The language of Quebec was the language of the settlers, who mostly spoke more western tongues.

As such, speaking more "educated" (ie standard) French is very much speaking Parisian. You don't need to be speaking with a paid accent to be speaking Parisian - you just need to be speaking the language as prescribed by «  l’académie »…

This is something that is kind of being forgotten though... The standard is being found more "French" as people around France forget about their local tongues. I can imagine that Quebec might be following the same thing; ie forgetting why their grandparents called it Parisian and thinking of it as just being "more French"...

[kleene*star]

The other oddity of some northern New England accents is weird rhoticity. You have:

• idea → ideer
• spa → spar
• Amanda → Amander
• Augusta → Auguster

Is this really a feature of their dialect or is this hypercorrection, that is, when they try to speak in a more standard way, they end up overapplying a rule (e.g: if my "lobstah" is "lobster" in the standard, then surely my "idea" is "ideer" in the standard).

[Cainntear]

The other oddity of some northern New England accents is weird rhoticity. You have:

• idea → ideer
• spa → spar
• Amanda → Amander
• Augusta → Auguster

Is this really a feature of their dialect or is this hypercorrection, that is, when they try to speak in a more standard way, they end up overapplying a rule (e.g: if my "lobstah" is "lobster" in the standard, then surely my "idea" is "ideer" in the standard).

Why not both? It could be an agent feature that started as hyper correction and then settled in as a loss of the phoneme. If the non-rhotic accents can lose a phonemic distinction, why not the rhotic ones too...?

[lichtrausch]

The other oddity of some northern New England accents is weird rhoticity. You have:

• idea → ideer
• spa → spar
• Amanda → Amander
• Augusta → Auguster

Is this really a feature of their dialect or is this hypercorrection, that is, when they try to speak in a more standard way, they end up overapplying a rule (e.g: if my "lobstah" is "lobster" in the standard, then surely my "idea" is "ideer" in the standard).

My (New England) speech has "ideer", but not "lobstah" or similar, so it doesn't seem to be hypercorrection in my case.

[dml130]

What do you all think about the future of French? I've seen such varying projections, everything from "it's a dying language" to its potentially being one of the top two or three most spoken languages in the world in 40 or 50 years.

Just chiming in to say that the idea that French is a dying language is cuckoo bananas.

Yes, that was poorly worded on my part, I should have been more precise. I haven't seen assessments/predictions suggesting it is a dying language on a global scale, but rather a dying language in some countries and therefore potentially on the decline overall internationally.

With that said, while things might look bleak for French in countries such as Mali, there are other African countries where, anecdotally, I've heard evidence that French language might be getting stronger. A few months back, I met somebody who has family ties to the Ivory Coast - she told me it isn't uncommon these days for kids to grow up speaking French as a first language, because often the parents come from different ethnicities speaking different native languages (therefore French is their best means of communication with each other within the household). So perhaps there will be a divergence in Africa, where the importance of French language grows in some countries, and wanes in others.