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Yes. He was well known in the States in Country music circles and in his day.
Last night, my dad who has known the song Lâche pas la patate since it came out in the 70s, was gobsmacked when I told him the singer actually said "mon nèg". He said he'd always thought it was "ma mère".
Are the accents in these islands considered closer to the accents in France than those in Quebec?
Only in certain exceptional cases. These would be limited to the French-administered islands like Martinique and Guadeloupe, to a specific class of people who've lived in and been primarily educated in European France.
Beyond that, the vast majority of people there have their own accents and they're not necessarily closer to or distant from the accent in France than those here in Quebec.
I lived in "San Domingue" - the Dominican Republic - Hispanola - for many years and there is a huge French population there. I worked as a journalist doing DR/Haiti work and also lived in Haiti for about a year many years ago. While it is true that only a small portion of the population there speaks French - a large percentage of them understand it since all secondary education is (or was) conducted in French. Anyone who wants to go to college has to pass the Bac - just like in France. I speak French and Spanish and always found that I could just speak French and those that spoke only Kreyole could usually understand me.. (I could NOT understand them- had to have a translator). As an aside - we had French TV there and when the Quebec TV shows came on, they would run subtitles under them in French.... The Haitian French accent is considered to be very pure French.
The newspapers and all the laws are written in French.
I know French is spoken in a few places. Do these places share a similar accent? What are some of the differences? I know there is also Patois spoken in Haiti. What about other places? Can a French speaker from France or Quebec understand them easily enough>?
I recently saw a video on Youtube of a French guy in Trinidad that had little to no problem holding a conversation with Trinidadian Patois speakers and they with him.
It's because they are mostly relegated to rural areas in the north of Trinidad. Despite Trinidad being a Spanish colony for centuries, during that time most of the White population was French and as a result the Black population spoke French or Trinidadian (French) Patois. There were also a number of European and "Colored" (mixed Black and White) people immigrating from other French speaking islands like Martinique and Guadeloupe to Trinidad. When the British took over in the early 1800's, they began a process of Anglicizing the country and it didn't really become a true Anglo-Caribbean country until the early 1900's. My grandmother still knows some basic Patois that she learned from her dad.
Accents vary depending on the country and sometimes within in a particular country. As far as patois, it is truly a Caribbean language. Plenty islands had significant French influence. Outside of Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique, patois speakers can be found in Dominica and St Lucia and to a lesser extent St Vincent, Grenada and Trinidad etc. Patois was even spoken in pockets in Venezuela.
This is new one for me. I know lots of Trinis, I never heard anyone mention "French Creoles" on that island. [/url]
French-Creole/patois was once the “lingua franca” of Trinidad. As mentioned by Paynefanbro, it was spoken by the majority until the early 1900s. It can be heard in the first calypsos. Today, Trinidadian dialect is full of Creole words and that’s the reason why.
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