Note that the academie francaise is way flexible to accept english words in the official vocabulary. In Quebec they literally have a french word to replace all common english expressions and prevent borrowing.
I met some ladies from Quebec while in France, and they were horrified at how tainted the French spoken by the natives had become. They said at one point they just started speaking exclusively in English because they couldn't stand hearing French butchered by the natives.
It's apparently a common phenomenon that language continues to evolve and grow in the native country, while in colonies and former colonies, people tend to become more protective and orthodox about the language. There is some research that suggests that certain American accents are closer to the British accents of the colonists than the modern British accent is.
Language continues to evolve and grow everywhere. What's going on isn't some impossible impulse in the Quebecois to conserve their language; they are trying to differentiate themselves from English-speaking Canada. The French in France don't need to worry about getting culturally absorbed in the way the Quebecois do.
But they still do, sorty of, in that France has some of the strictest laws pertaining to language use in Europe.
It's not just language. I assume that it's because while the native population marches on naturally, the emigrants are trying to preserve the culture and language they brought with them, with no influence from their original home country. Being surrounded by a foreign language/culture probably also leads to emphasising the distinctions (e.g. to avoid loan words out of fear of watering down your identity).
There's a funny youtube video of a French Canadian girl who lives in France and compares the number of anglicisms in the movie "Starbucks" and its French remake (not sure why they did a remake) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Cw9ywW-TU Video is in French but the movie Starbucks had way more anglicisms in it. Nothing scientific here but having lived many years in Montreal I can tell you that the French spoken in Quebec is far from being English free.
My understanding, from spending a few days in Quebec, interacting with people from there, and listening to lots of shows about the french language, there are two school of thoughts in Quebec:
- one that french as to be pure, where pure means not a single word with roots that can be traced back to english.
- one that borrows a lot of words from modern english, which are pronounced with an english accent (as opposed to english word adopted in France, which are pronounced with a french accent).
I don't know where the line is drawn, if they are the same people in different context, or a social class, or just a conscious decision to adopt one vs the other, but all the jazz about language laws there seem to be coming from the first group.
Also note there isn't a single version of the french language in Canada, but several across the country which is based on where the original people came from in France, and what influence that language has had over the past 400 years.
When the French lost to the british in 177x-ish, people of Quebec were left to fend for themselves. They fought tooth and nail to preserve their culture and language and I think to this day there's still this inertia going on in the way modern French Canadians think.
Moreover, there has been a study/survey showing that isolated culturally homogeneous communities tend to heavy-handedly police (the US style) the use of their native languages. I wish I could find a link to that study :-(
As a native russian speaker living in the US i can actually confirm that the study seems to ring true; i dislike (very much so) when russian speakers start mixing in english words.
But on the other hand, your Québec friend will tell you that you can "plugger" your "laptop", he has "checké" that there is a "plug" that is "loose" on the nearby "powerstrip".
I lived there for a bit more than a year, and I'm pretty sure they use at least as many anglicisms in daily life as we do in France. However, we both pay more attention to the anglicisms used by the others when we're in their country because we're not used to them.
They avoid them a lot more than we do in written language though.
Lol, I always felt jealous of them. They would just blend in with the crowd. In contrast, I have a very pronounced accent in English and don't even get me started on my French.