Talk:Acadian French

thank you

i am in canada now, in a french immersion programe at univeristy of ste anne. i am taking an acadian culture class and i noticed my teacher kept using the word "pis." i was baffled. thank you.

dialect/variety

A dialect/variety is not close to become a language even if sometimes it is not understandable. Wikipedia is being used by people with some ideas that are incorrect and full of POV. Please correct if this is really a language and not a variety. Maybe some pride Americans... -Pedro 11:35, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I find the article to be useful. 'Pis', anent the entry from the person learning Acadian, who was mystified by its use in class: Pis is common in conversational Quebec French, and I think elsewhere. It is a contraction for 'et puis', 'and then'. It's used in the same way 'so' is used to punctuate oral discourse in English: "So, as i was saying...". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Djrdubois (talk • contribs) 19:02, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

removed

I removed the bit about alveolar R. Most Acadians actually use the uvular R, as in France. Only a few villages might use alveolar. --142.166.97.102 18:26, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'd disagree with this. Uvular Rs might be present in northern New Brunswick, but in the south-east an alveolar R is the norm. Adjusting 07:13, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

In and around Neguac there is an alveolar R. Neguac is situated south of the Peninsule Acadienne, in North east New Brunswick. And yes, the south-east part of New-Brunswick uses an alveolar R. I would say that the alveolar R is stronger in Neguac than the one is the South East... sounds like the Spanish R.

vice versa

I would just like to state that Acadian French is not derived from Cajun, but rather vice versa. Cajuns are the direct descendants of Acadians deported during the "Grande Dérangement". The name 'Cajun' is actually a derivative of the French word 'Acadien', which is pronounced by Acadians as 'A-ca-jeune'.

and acadians are not derived from cajuns, but rather vice versa. Gringo300 04:02, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

translations

The translations into standard French of the descriptions of 'fricot', 'pète-de-sœur', 'poutine râpée', and 'tétine-de-souris' seem out of place. Does anyone find these to be useful? -Adjusting 20:38, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

health

How healthy is Acadian French? (speakers, ages etc.) —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 06:27, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

That is the question that emmerged to me too. — Slavik IVANOV 11:35, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

AF for the sake of AF

L'Acadien pour l'amour de l'acadien

The intro paragraphs to this article seem to belong more to armchair linguistics than anything else. They lack structure and contain more conjecture and opinion than fact, if any.

I suggest a basic who-what-when-where-how-why approach that does NOT constantly compare AF to other dialects/varieties/languages. Not only are the intelligibility and archaism issues annoying, they are disinformative. CJ Withers 22:36, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Ouâille?

Does anyone actually say this? I've always said ouin.

ouin is also used in the province of Quebec... ouâille is common in the North-East part of New-Brunswick.

My boyfriend is from near Bathurst and I spend a lot of time up there... my experience is that people say (and write) ouais or ouan. Actually, I think that the effects of education and a generation of exposure to French television from Quebec is eroding the distinctiveness of Acadian French... like the relationship between Newfoundland English and standard Canadian English, I see it heading towards being just a somewhat accented variant of standard Quebec French. In a lot of ways I think you can get more useful information about the way Acadians actually speak from the Quebec French article than from the Acadian French one.

I corrected "pi" to "pis" in the word list... everyone I've ever seen writes it as "pis", and that reflects the origin as well.

--Steve D (talk) 12:34, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

difficulty understanding?

Many speakers of other dialects of French, such as speakers of Metropolitan French, i.e. the French of France, and even of other Canadian dialects, have difficulty understanding Acadian French.

Would we write on a Canadian English article page that most speakers of RP or any other British English dialect would have difficulty understanding Canadian English? This seems odd to me.DDD DDD 07:24, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

As I was reading the article, the exact same question came to mind. It seems to me like that sentence isn't really saying anything worthwhile about acadian French, and is also trying to set it apart from other languages on the basis that intercomprehension between this dialect and another isn't always there, which is the case for a whole lot of dialect and varieties. I'd say that comment shouldn't be there, or it should be rephrased. ideas?

Perhaps an example would illustrate the idea behind that sentence. Myself, I am a speaker of Acadian French and that was the only French I had heard until I was an adult. The first time I heard Metropolitan French I could barely understand it. I recognized it as French but the accent was different enough that I couldn't follow it. That in itself is not particularly notable, as is mentioned above, because it didn't take long to adjust to it. I've tried speaking to speakers of Metropolitan French too to have them not recognize that I was speaking French. The first time I heard Québec French I didn't even recognize it as French. They also do not recognize my dialect as French. There is a huge difference in pronunciation between the two dialects, large enough that it took me several months just to be able to follow most of Québécois TV. I don't know of any Québécois who has learnt to understand my dialect but I suppose it would take just as long. The comment probably is unnecessary but I think the idea behind its inclusion is that with English two speakers from pretty much anywhere would be able to understand each other without great difficulty, which is not the case with Acadian French. -- 24.224.150.205 14:47, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I think that it is a little exagerated to say that Acadian French is hard to understand for Quebec French speakers. I'm a Quebecer myself and I understand at least 90% of what Acadians say. The only exceptions are Chiac speakers. Their French is so much full of anglicisms that I don't understand them. I recognize the acadian accent, some of the french or english words, but I'm not generally able to understand the meaning of what they say. Metropolitan French (Parisian French) speakers are the most likely to have difficulty with Acadian French because the pronunciation is very different. So, I feel that it is misleading and the differences should not be exagerated. Kovlovsky (talk) 04:29, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Similarities with Norman?

This article mentions that Acadien descends from Anjou and Poitou dialects, and so I'm wondering if its similarities with Norman are simple coincidence, or evidence of some relation, as well. Examples:

• "tch" and "dg" are common in similar places in Acadien and Norman, and r's seem to drop off regularly in similar contexts in some Norman dialects.
• "asteure" is comparable to "à ch't heu" in Jèrriais (a Norman dialect)
• "itou" is identical to Cotentinais "itou" and similar to Jèrriais "étout"
• "mitan" is the exact same in Jèrriais.

There are perhaps other examples. The Jade Knight 06:46, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I know there's at least Philippe Mius d’Entremont to have come to Acadie from Normandy so it seems no coincidence. I'm from the region of Par-en-Bas and all of those examples are still prominent in our French. I haven't been able to find any information on how many Norman settlers there were but it seems likely that there were more. There's also the region of Par-en-Haut with a French similar to my own which matches your observations. -- 24.224.150.205 14:18, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

My ancestor came from Normandy and settled in Beauport (Quebec). Today we so not speak an Acadian version of french. People from all over France settled in Quebec as did Acadia. I do not think we can say all Acadians came from the same area, as we cannot say all Quebecois came from the same areas. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.139.0.55 (talk) 15:07, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Acadian English?

Is there such thing as Acadian English (as opposed to CAJUN English)? Gringo300 02:07, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Not really. Many Acadians in the Maritimes speak English as a second language. So basically it would be the variant of English spoken in the Maritimes, spoken with an Acadian French accent.--Sonjaaa 04:37, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

le mot harrer devrait etre sur la liste. Harrer : Battre ou traiter pauvrement . C'est un mot qui est purement acadien.

Jersey...?

Acadian French derives loosely from late Middle French still widespread in a few French provinces (mainly: Maine, Anjou, Poitou, Saintonge, Aunis, Angoumois and more specifically Jersey) at the time of the French colonization of the Americas

Wouldn't the Jersey dialect technically be a dialect of Middle Norman rather than Middle French? Prof Wrong (talk) 20:00, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Canadian French...?

From the article:

Like Quebec French, it is a variant of Canadian French.

Ok, so the label "Canadian French" exists and is in common use, but to me this is a misleading statement. "Canadian French" is an umbrella term, a geographical label. Written this way, it seems to imply a divergent evolution that occurred within Canada, whereas the three main Francophone areas of Canada evolved their dialects independently, starting from different dialect brought in from l'Hexagone... Prof Wrong (talk) 15:28, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Canadian French.Moxy (talk) 15:47, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes. And? My opinion is that the current wording makes the article unclear. Do you disagree? Prof Wrong (talk) 16:01, 31 August 2011 (UTC)