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Not really the thickest accent possible, but first I could think of off the top of my head.
I'm not really arguing Canadian accents can't be tricky to understand sometimes to people previously unexposed to them, just that there's no need to Radio-Canadize them before they are. And that the RC accent is much more about cosmetic changes and prestigious norms than it is about practical concerns (and as such, the RC norms could easily be relaxed by quite a bit). The video in the previous post was just an example, but watching e.g. the news, the vast majority of interviewees don't significantly modify their accents, but most make the effort to speak clearly and enunciate (obviously fewer when it comes to man in the street segments), and those who do are not any less clear or easy to understand than the anchors or reporters, despite still speaking in their local accent - sometimes toned down, but not Radio-Canadized away. That is, those interviewees sound very different than the anchors or hosts, but both sides of the interview are fully and easily understandable. I'm speaking from my own experience (as someone with only a passive knowledge of the language) from back before I'd had significant exposure to Canadian accents.
As for people speaking totally naturally and spontaneously in an informal context and at a fast pace, I found (and, to some extent, still do) strong Quebecois accents quite a bit more difficult than strong Acadian ones (with the exception of SW NS ones, which I'd say were about as difficult as tricky Quebecois ones). I guess the prevalence of diphthongs makes the Quebecois ones more difficult at first when you've mostly been exposed to European French? Not sure if it's just that.
I don't disagree that slangy informal Quebec French can be hard to decipher and that the accent can be quite thick.
But I think there is more to it than that.
It's that people in Quebec (and also in northern NB) are more able to switch to a more standard French more easily when required. The difference is especially striking when accounting for socio-economic level.
Here is an MPP (provincial legislator) from northern Ontario. Given the context (and interviewer) you can assume he is speaking his best "Sunday French".
In most francophone communities in the ROC, this is pretty much the "best Sunday French" you'll hear from elected officials, public servants, lawyers, doctors, and even francophone school principals and teachers.
It's that people in Quebec (and also in northern NB) are more able to switch to a more standard French more easily when required. The difference is especially striking when accounting for socio-economic level.
Yeah, I saw that on Twitter yesterday, but only commented this morning.
I agree with you 100%, and am actually shocked at how unanimous the "unicorn" view is among the people who have chimed in. Including many community activists and academics who should know the facts and the "track record" on this front.
In fairness as I pointed out in French, Canada's legal and constitutional rights that grandfather access to public French language education to people who went to school in French themselves make it really difficult if not impossible to deny admission of these kids to francophone schools, even if they don't speak a word of French.
If they cared about the francophone community and its future, wouldn't they have spoken French to their own kids from the time they were born?
I was a bit shocked both at that, and also at just how bad the situation already was in Moncton. I'd have guessed a quarter of the kids, maybe a third in some classes. Half is just staggering. How it's not the main topic of conversation in circles concerned about the survival of French, I will never understand. I already mentioned the buses. The whole huge bus conflict seems downright bizarre knowing how little there is to francophone schools basically becoming immersion. Blaine Higgs not speaking French and disrespecting francophones is bad, but very far from lethal. What's going on with schools is a death blow.
When the kids stop speaking French, people will blame schools focusing on the standard, Radio-Canada being too Quebec-focused, local English-only advertising, the fact that there is no "francophone K-pop" (yes, I've actually heard that one), the lack of French debates in New Brunswick, francophone-owned restaurants with no French-speaking waiters... Anything and everything, except for the fact that the kids were dropped from the earliest age into what was essentially intensive English immersion.
Even if it weren't mainly about job skills, and these were somehow all cases of parents bitterly regretting the loss caused by the grandparents' choice of not transmitting French due to societal prejudice, it would still be lunacy to sacrifice the whole language community in an attempt to attenuate the situation. Whatever the parents' feelings and motivations, it's not right that the whole language minority is further weakened by having to take responsibility for all these families' choices.
Do you know how or why the right in question came to be? It becomes obvious that it's disaster waiting to happen as soon as one thinks a little into the future.
Also, if somehow the relevant people (those who could at least try to do something about it) saw the light, would there be any real options? Would it be at all possible in Canada to restrict an existing right like this in any way?
What's even more scandalous is that a supposedly reputable newspaper like the Washington Post chooses this guy to be their Canadian affairs columnist.
As opposed to someone like me?
I find JJ kind of amusing, and I do think he has some interesting points from time to time amid all his BS, but, yeah, that the Washington Post chose him tells me all I need to know about their standards.
Beyond just his usual obtuse, not very serious political analysis, his chances of working for a respectable publication should have been over when he claimed Quebec's culture was just so terrible and racist that it was the main cause of Canada's mass shootings. Not that I'm too surprised that they weren't.
Speaking of Quebec bashing, the election sure stirred up a lot of it.
In the last two weeks, I've seen Quebec compared to the Nazis, apartheid-era South Africa, China's treatment of the Uyghurs, Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and white supremacist terrorists with their fourteen words. Was surprised not to see 90s Rwanda brought up.
I find JJ kind of amusing, and I do think he has some interesting points from time to time amid all his BS, but, yeah, that the Washington Post chose him tells me all I need to know about their standards.
Beyond just his usual obtuse, not very serious political analysis, his chances of working for a respectable publication should have been over when he claimed Quebec's culture was just so terrible and racist that it was the main cause of Canada's mass shootings. Not that I'm too surprised that they weren't.
Speaking of Quebec bashing, the election sure stirred up a lot of it.
In the last two weeks, I've seen Quebec compared to the Nazis, apartheid-era South Africa, China's treatment of the Uyghurs, Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and white supremacist terrorists with their fourteen words. Was surprised not to see 90s Rwanda brought up.
I was a bit shocked both at that, and also at just how bad the situation already was in Moncton. I'd have guessed a quarter of the kids, maybe a third in some classes. Half is just staggering. How it's not the main topic of conversation in circles concerned about the survival of French, I will never understand. I already mentioned the buses. The whole huge bus conflict seems downright bizarre knowing how little there is to francophone schools basically becoming immersion. Blaine Higgs not speaking French and disrespecting francophones is bad, but very far from lethal. What's going on with schools is a death blow.
When the kids stop speaking French, people will blame schools focusing on the standard, Radio-Canada being too Quebec-focused, local English-only advertising, the fact that there is no "francophone K-pop" (yes, I've actually heard that one), the lack of French debates in New Brunswick, francophone-owned restaurants with no French-speaking waiters... Anything and everything, except for the fact that the kids were dropped from the earliest age into what was essentially intensive English immersion.
Even if it weren't mainly about job skills, and these were somehow all cases of parents bitterly regretting the loss caused by the grandparents' choice of not transmitting French due to societal prejudice, it would still be lunacy to sacrifice the whole language community in an attempt to attenuate the situation. Whatever the parents' feelings and motivations, it's not right that the whole language minority is further weakened by having to take responsibility for all these families' choices.
Do you know how or why the right in question came to be? It becomes obvious that it's disaster waiting to happen as soon as one thinks a little into the future.
Also, if somehow the relevant people (those who could at least try to do something about it) saw the light, would there be any real options? Would it be at all possible in Canada to restrict an existing right like this in any way?
I think that they really thought they could lure a lot of people back. And actually to some degree they did.
But the maximum has mostly been reached and now as you say it's spilling over to the other side where truly francophone kids are being anglicized by all of the non-francophones in the system.
In terms of strategy one needs to remember that at the time most of the ROC provinces except NB were reticent about opening French schools.
One of the arguments was that no one would want to attend them.
And so the idea was to go after the numbers to justify their existence.
So, this will be a long post, but it's been an eventful time in Canadian politics and ROC-Quebec discourse, and, for better or worse, I have some thoughts on it I worry an outsider hobbyist commenting on this could easily come across as flippant or as expecting that Quebeckers think or vote or live a certain way. Definitely not my intention. Just a few observations and personal opinions.
Firstly, the debate which kickstarted this latest bout of tension... Most of the discussion following revolved around Bill 21, but I thought Bill 96 being called out was much more noteworthy. I think the phrasing of the question would still be inappropriate if it was only about Bill 21 (and I say that someone who doesn't agree with the bill), but it wouldn't be surprising. Bill 96 being explicitly labeled as discriminatory and marginalizing in an approved debate question, though, was pretty shocking and much more significant.
It's remarkable how forgiving and thick-skinned Quebeckers are about all of this kind of stuff (much unlike the Anglo-Canadian-generated stereotype that would have them be a bunch of thin-skinned whiners). In and of themselves, these are good traits, of course. And it's also how things usually are, with minority language groups being patient and accommodating, and majority groups on the attack. But in Quebec this now verges on naivety, probably because of the (IMO misleading) sense of security things like Bill 101 have created. So many people always primarily focusing on "looking at things from another angle" or "having empathy for the other perspective", and totally convinced that "other Canadians don't really have a problem with Quebec, that's just what it looks like"... Even in the many, many cases where what's coming from the ROC or Anglo Quebeckers is just deliberate slander, anti-French rhetoric and ugly hatred for an entire ethnic group. Many are even convinced that Quebeckers have more of a problem with other Canadians than other Canadians have with them, even in the face of actual data that shows that, no, Quebec doesn't really have a problem with the rest of Canada, and yes, the rest of Canada strongly dislikes Quebec.
(I mention "ethnic" because there is sadly definitely an ugly ethnic (anti-French-Canadian) aspect in play here, more and more openly so. The constant mantra of pure laine this and pure laine that in anti-Qc rhetoric has never been a coincidence, but more and more I see people being completely explicit about. E.g. in a thread the other day (from which two of the ridiculous comparisons in my previous post come from) people were advising an immigrant to Quebec to settle in Montreal (as opposed to Quebec City) because in Montreal it's easier to avoid "the Quebecois" and stick to anglophones and immigrants.)
None of this is to say that there is no ROC-bashing or anti-anglophone sentiment in Quebec, but it just can't compare with the prevalence, the sheer volume, the amount of imaginative slander, the high (and increasing) social acceptance and the strength of animus behind anti-Quebecois sentiments. It's just unrelenting.
I think that with many of the older federalist Quebeckers naivety towards the rest of Canada comes from the language barrier (not that all federalists are naive, of course, but there's a fairly large subset that has an idealized vision of Canada). So at first I would've guessed that, with the language barrier getting smaller and smaller, younger generations would be less idealistic about Canada. But I've actually come to believe that the lowering of the language barrier and the constant exposure to online Quebec-bashing that young Quebeckers experience in the Internet era are having the opposite effect. Faced with so much contempt (and in online spaces Quebec-bashing is everywhere, and really is giving Quebeckers more and more of an undeservedly horrible reputation) many of them internalize a lot of the slander, and put their energy into proving that "not everyone in Quebec wants to oppress English speakers/is paranoid about language/is a French Canadian supremacist etc. etc., and that they're one of the "good ones". This is very understandable, as nobody likes being despised and ridiculed, least of all young people. And there's still time for some of them to grow out of it. But for now, such attitudes only seem to be spreading, and things are looking pretty dicey for the continued defense of French in Quebec, at a time when it'll be more necessary than it has been in decades.
For now, Francophone Quebeckers have had maybe the best luck of any language minority in the world. This is not to deny the hardships they've faced or to say English Canada has historically been great to them. But to come out of everything into the second half of the 20th century as the majority in a province of a federation in which provinces have a broad jurisdiction and a lot of power and which allows the provinces to vote on independence (let's ignore the later undemocratic Clarity Act stuff), is stuff most language minorities can only dream of. I think that makes many Quebeckers feel too secure, like things can go wrong and still simply be reversed, but things are different now, and circumstances like the extreme birthrate and many anglophones leaving for more anglophone regions won't be repeated. If anything, it's increasingly looking like Quebeckers might want to start developing contingency plans for preserving French in Quebec in a post-Montreal future and, some day, probably an officially bilingual Quebec.
I think that they really thought they could lure a lot of people back. And actually to some degree they did.
But the maximum has mostly been reached and now as you say it's spilling over to the other side where truly francophone kids are being anglicized by all of the non-francophones in the system.
In terms of strategy one needs to remember that at the time most of the ROC provinces except NB were reticent about opening French schools.
One of the arguments was that no one would want to attend them.
And so the idea was to go after the numbers to justify their existence.
Thanks, that makes sense. Quite a gamble, but I guess a future where francophone schools in these areas are absolutely bursting at the seams, largely with anglophone children, would have been difficult to envisage at that point.
And the state of things in Moncton being quite that catastrophic is shocking even knowing the situation of most francophone schools in other ROC provinces.
I can't really think of anything that could be done now that would be constitutional, practical and/or accepted by ayant droit parents. I thought of creating separate streams or even separate schools in those regions where there are significant numbers of francophone children, with the stream with anglophone kids still being part of the francophone board and being fully in French and staffed by fully qualified native speakers, thus retaining its edge and attraction over French immersion? I guess not being around francophone kids would be seen as a drawback by the anglophone kids parents, but outside of lessons the communication between the kids ends up being in English with such numbers anyway. And as for communication during lessons, kids who start an all-French education at a very young age with native speakers as teachers should develop very strong French, including native-like or native-adjacent accents (an issue you mention in your reply on Twitter) even in an all-anglophone class. So how much of a difference would it really make at that point? (French immersion's big problems seems to be a lack of availability of high quality teachers, late entry points and going back and forth between French and English in lessons/reserving some of the most important subjects for English.)
But yeah, not very practical and possibly unconstitutional.
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