# Canadian French and Afrikaans



## PrincessLyka

I understand that Canadian French is somewhat different from French; and Afrikaans (one of the European languages spoken in South Africa) is derived from Dutch, which was brought by the first pioneers.

Would anyone know if there is a similarity in the evolution of the new language, in terms of grammar and spelling (Afrikaans has a different spelling than Dutch), influence of local (New World/Africa) words, etc?

Thank you in advance!


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## Joannes

Afrikaans was regarded as being Dutch for a very long time (only to be officially recognized in 1925), and was written in Dutch spelling. It's no coincidence the first text undoubtedly to be considered Afrikaans was written in Arabic script! Also, syntactic differences will probably have been leveled to some extent in written language. (I suppose you can compare this to Belgian speakers of Dutch who also don't speak as they write, as you probably know. ) A 'true' Afrikaans spelling was standardized starting from the first quarter of the 20th century on.

Afrikaans grammar is very much simplified compared to its Dutch base (or target ), e.g. in powerful systems like verbal inflection, pronouns, verb classes, ... There has been a substantial influence from languages like Khoi, Malay (lingua franca among slaves), Portuguese (same thing), Zulu, Xhosa, and English - obviously.

I don't know anything about québécois, but someone who does can make the comparison then.  I only see a similarity in the linguistic situation together with and heavily influenced by English.


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## konungursvia

Canadian French is one of a family of European languages spoken in the Americas, as most people know. It shares many of the characteristics of this group. Contrary to popular belief, which would imagine these "American cousins" to be watered-down, bastardized or fringe dialects, they are all more conservative than their Old Continent counterparts, and generally provide a window into how the migrants spoke their language approximately 400 years ago. As you moved across the Atlantic, class mobility was more fluid, and more people adopted the accents of the "desirable" classes for themselves and their children. Consequently, Quebec French is essentially identical to the French of aristocrats a few centuries ago. 

At a recent conference of linguistics professors from France and Quebec about eight years ago at the University of Toronto, I was suprised to hear them all agree that not one "Quebecism" -- whether vocabulary, abbreviations, slang, colourful expressions or whatever -- could not also be found in a region of France. Both Quebec and France borrow heavily from English these days, and their attractions and repulsions ("parking/stationnement, shopping/magasinage,  email/courriel, fax/telecopie, etc) are different, but Quebec French was always spoken by native speakers, and never served as a pidgin or creole, and so was never simplified or blended or diluted. Hope this helps.


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## palomnik

I have always felt that there is a sort of continuum regarding languages spoken in "colonial" cultures. Primarily, there are five of them in the modern world, setting aside such historical developments as Latin, Greek and Arabic: Dutch, Portuguese, English, French, Spanish.

Konungsurvia is of course right when he says that Quebecois retains many older forms of French, but I think it tends to be the exception rather than the rule in that regard, and I can't agree with the idea that the daughter dialects tend to retain older forms of the language as a general rule.  Afrikaans is probably the one that has strayed the most from its ancestor, and in this respect is followed in a respectable second by Portuguese.  Brazilian Portuguese is considerably different than European Portuguese in both vocabulary and grammar. Once again, the branch that has changed the most tends to be the colonial variation; even material written in Brazilian Portuguese 150 years ago sounds antique to modern Brazilians.

For English and Spanish, the differences between Europe and the rest of the world tend to be slighter, despite the strident declamations to the contrary; there really isn't much difference between Peninsular and American Spanish, outside of vocabulary, pronunciation and a couple of grammatical preferences, and educated usage tends to be the same everywhere.  It is true, however, that American Spanish pronunciation often retains some similarities to older dialects in Spain.  As for English, I think the differences in usage are highly overrated.


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## Outsider

palomnik said:


> Afrikaans is probably the one that has strayed the most from its ancestor, and in this respect is followed in a respectable second by Portuguese.  Brazilian Portuguese is considerably different than European Portuguese in both vocabulary and grammar. Once again, the branch that has changed the most tends to be the colonial variation; even material written in Brazilian Portuguese 150 years ago sounds antique to modern Brazilians.


Hmm, I don't quite agree with that. Brazilian Portuguese (and African Portuguese!) is _more_ conservative than European Portuguese in many ways. For instance, in terms of pronunciation. Of course, in other aspects it's the opposite. It's difficult to quantify in absolute terms.



palomnik said:


> As for English, I think the differences in usage are highly overrated.


What I have learned about this issue is that native speakers of one language usually downplay the dialectal variations within their own language, and overstate the ones of other languages.


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## vince

konungursvia said:


> Canadian French is one of a family of European languages spoken in the Americas, as most people know. It shares many of the characteristics of this group. Contrary to popular belief, which would imagine these "American cousins" to be watered-down, bastardized or fringe dialects, they are all more conservative than their Old Continent counterparts, and generally provide a window into how the migrants spoke their language approximately 400 years ago.



This is not entirely accurate. It would probably be better to say that Quebecois preserves many features that French lost, while Quebecois has also invented new features that French never had.

The same can be said for American English vs. British English. e.g. The R's  in the word "farmer" used to be pronounced all over the UK, also some American words (like "trash") were used in the UK before being supplanted (by "rubbish" in this case). The reason why certain Northeastern U.S. dialects also lost the "r" (rhoticity) was because they maintained contact longer with the UK.

Quebecois has many innovations, e.g. the particle [tsy] (pronounced like "tu" (you)) in yes-no  questions, the loss of feminine "they" (i sont), reduction of "elle" to "a", different rules for consonant elision,  diphtongization of most French pure vowels, palatization of "t" and "d", and of course lots of new quebecois words.


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## jfm

Outsider said:


> Hmm, I don't quite agree with that. Brazilian Portuguese (and African Portuguese!) is _more_ conservative than European Portuguese in many ways. For instance, in terms of pronunciation. Of course, in other aspects it's the opposite. It's difficult to quantify in absolute terms.



As for African varieties of Portuguese, it's true they tend to be more "archaic", but that's only true for the norm varieties, the kind of Portuguese taught in schools and the one (educated) people strive towards in formal contexts.

Colloquially, however, there is much divergence from the European standard, with lots of influences from local languages, especially pronunciation, but perhaps more so in the lexicon.

Incidentally, Portuguese in Mozambique shows considerable influence from Brazilian Portuguese from at least the 1980s onwards, since Brazilian soap operas are extremely popular on TV. It may be true for other Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Sao tome, and Cape Verde, though I'm not too sure.


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## Outsider

jfm said:


> As for African varieties of Portuguese, it's true they tend to be more "archaic", but that's only true for the norm varieties, the kind of Portuguese taught in schools and the one (educated) people strive towards in formal contexts.
> 
> Colloquially, however, there is much divergence from the European standard, with lots of influences from local languages, especially pronunciation, but perhaps more so in the lexicon.


I think you've missed my point. European Portuguese has itself diverged from classical Portuguese, in some ways more than Brazilian or African Portuguese.


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## jfm

Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes here. I didn't have anything like Classical Portuguese in mind. My time frame was no more than half a century, or so, when Portuguese was introduced into African educational systems. In effect, the form of Portuguese that became a sort of educational standard in Africa was the European literary norm of the 60s and 70s.



> European Portuguese has itself diverged from classical Portuguese, in some ways more than Brazilian or African Portuguese.



And I'm sure that in other areas, the African Portugueses (colloquial ones) have diverged from Class.Port. more than the European one has.

---
jfm


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## Babakexorramdin

Joannes said:


> Afrikaans was regarded as being Dutch for a very long time (only to be officially recognized in 1925), and was written in Dutch spelling. It's no coincidence the first text undoubtedly to be considered Afrikaans was written in Arabic script! Also, syntactic differences will probably have been leveled to some extent in written language. (I suppose you can compare this to Belgian speakers of Dutch who also don't speak as they write, as you probably know. ) A 'true' Afrikaans spelling was standardized starting from the first quarter of the 20th century on.
> 
> Afrikaans grammar is very much simplified compared to its Dutch base ), e.g. in powerful systems like verbal inflection, pronouns, verb classes, ... There has been a substantial influence from languages like Khoi, Malay (lingua franca among slaves), Portuguese (same thing), Zulu, Xhosa, and English - obviously.
> 
> I don't know anything about québécois, but someone who does can make the comparison then.  I only see a similarity in the linguistic situation together with and heavily influenced by English.


 

Once an Afrikaner told me that he knew/was told that Afrikaans has its roots in Western Dutch dialects and he pointed to Zeeland, Zeeuws Vlaanderen and Western Belgium.
But when asked for similarity with a Zeeuw (from Zeeland) he denied.


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## PrincessLyka

Thank you all for your most informative answers!!


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## Joannes

Babakexorramdin said:


> Once an Afrikaner told me that he knew/was told that Afrikaans has its roots in Western Dutch dialects and he pointed to Zeeland, Zeeuws Vlaanderen and Western Belgium.


There are some characteristics that Afrikaans has in common with western dialects but those needn't be accounted for in terms of 'monogenesis'. The Dutch base of Afrikaans was probably a mix of dialects in which the Hollandic variety (varieties) was (were) dominant.



Babakexorramdin said:


> But when asked for similarity with a Zeeuw (from Zeeland) he denied.


I'm not sure what you mean by this.


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## Babakexorramdin

The man from Zeeland simply said he sees not much similarities with Afrikaans without deliberating too much.
The only thing he said about his dialect was that you "Hollanders" wont understand it very well!


He also did not answer whether or not in his dialect they also use the root of the verb for both singular and plural. He did not answer that too, probably he was not familiar with grammatical names. I wanted to see if the usage of root was based on the fact that the vowel -e- is dropped in some dialects which makes the pronounciation of n difficulult.
My hypothesis was bv. Krijgen -> Krijgn -> Krijg (Afrikaans spelling Kryg)

this omission of e from plural however is present also in North-Eastern Dutch dialects, but the fact that ij and ee are pronounced as a smooth ee (or something between ei and ee) resembles more the south-wetsern dialects especially the Flemish dialects, however that feature is also sometimes heared in the dialect of the Hague.


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## Joannes

Oh, I see.

Most similarities between western dialects and Afrikaans are in phonetics. As far as I know, all western dialects distinguish between a verbal stem and its infinitive. The evolution *krijgen* > *krijg* (<kryg>) is best accounted for in terms of linguistic simplification. (The same holds for quite some of the phonetic features Afrikaans has in common with the western dialects, by the way.)

PS:


Babakexorramdin said:


> you "Hollanders"


Please, I am no Hollander; not in a broad, nor in a narrow sense.


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## Grosvenor1

On the subject of Canadian French, I  believe the Marquis de Montcalm said in the 18th century that it was quite "correct". Standard French was probably a minority although prestige dialect in France itself at the time, while various patois were very common, and Montcalm was probably reacting to Canadian French being very like the standard language of Paris at that time. It probably diverged later from Parisian French, perhaps in part because of British rule.


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## Frank06

*Hi,*

*The main topic of this thread is Canadian French and Afrikaans.*

*In the course of this thread, comparisons have been made between the situation of Dutch and Afrikaans on the one hand, and the situation of Portuguese (in Africa) and Spanish (in South America) on the other hand. *

*Interesting points and interesting comparisons.*

*However, people who wish to ad (or ask for) more information on the differences between other 'European' languages and their further developments in other continents, are kindly asked to open a new thread.*

*Groetjes,*

*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


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## Blümchen

French in Canada is not only spoken in Quebec. The French in the West, e.g. Winnipeg, is more similar to the French in France than  to the French in Quebec. It came mostly by Métis (Half Native American, half French) to the West. Today most native speakers speak more English than French and I met French Canadian how had problems to speak a single sentence without any English.


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## Kevin Beach

When I was staying in Mechelen, Belgium, a few years ago, I got talking to some young Afrikaaners in the hotel bar. They commented that they found it easier to understand Flemings than Netherlanders, because Flemish speech is closer to Afrikaans than Dutch is.


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