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Comment by koenigdavidmj | Hacker News Reader

'Courriel' for email was an Académie invention, not Québécois. It isn't as clear-cut as you describe.

my two cents. I took a couple of French classes in Canada and I can vouch that those guys don't mess around; they are like French vocab nazis :-P so it's always "la fin de la semaine" and "courriel electronique". In contrast, one of my friends is "French" French. She got no issues saying "le weekend" or "e-mail."

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.

> it's always "la fin de la semaine" and "courriel electronique". In contrast, one of my friends is "French" French. She got no issues saying "le weekend" or "e-mail."

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.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't know :-( I lived in Ontario where people mostly spoke English. A couple buddies of mine were from Quebec. When they spoke French they would never use an anglicism. I suspect they were making a conscious effort to not to. I did say this in my reply above that expats do tend to get very protective of the use of their native language (present company included). Similarly, when they spoke English, you wouldn't know that they were from Quebec since they spoke in an Ontarian accent and used the exact same vocab you expect a native Torontotian to use. For example, they could say to me, could you close the lights please. "Close the lights" is a very common expression in Ontario and yet I've never heard anybody using it beyond that province.

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.

Courriel is definitely from Quebec; it was only adopted officially in France in 2003, while it had been in use in Canada since the late 90s.

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