FRENCH IN QUEBEC: BASIC CHARACTERISTICS

Valentina A. Kozhemyakina
Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Federation

Abstract

The article is devoted to a comparative description of the main features of the Quebec version of the French language, which has developed in Quebec since the beginning of the French mastery of North America. The description of the morphological system and the lexical composition of the Quebec version of the French language made it possible to reveal its main characteristics. The research was based on dictionaries and descriptions of the Quebec language, as well as the author’s own conclusions in analyzing the speech of Quebecers. With a dominant trend towards the standard French language, the language of the Franco-Quebec is characterized by archaisms and dialectisms lost by the French language of the metropolis or survived only in dialects. A certain group of the lexicon is made up of anglicisms, although their number is not as large as one might expect. A special layer of vocabulary is Canadianisms used by French colonists to denote plants, animals, and nature phenomena unknown to them. The new vocabulary was either borrowed or created anew. One can be sure that the language of the Franco-Quebec is a variant of the French language with peculiarities arising from the conditions of its development.

Keywords: Quebec version of French, archaisms, Canadianisms, borrowings, comparative analysis, Indianisms, word formation

For citation: Kozhemyakina V.A. French in Quebec: basic characteristics. Sociolinguistics, 2020, no. 4 [online], pp. 61–74.

DOI: 10.37892/2713-2951-2020-4-4-61-74 (In Russ.)