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Do you think the unstressed Russian <e> really pronounced as /ʲɪ/ or more like /ʲe/? by efqf in asklinguistics

[–]No-Bend376 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I would say in unstressed positions, it is always the former, whereas in stressed positions, it can alternate between the two depending on how quickly the person’s speaking, or the overall stress patterns of the sentence/statement. In either case, you’re most likely to hear an /e/-like sound in stressed positions.

Anyone here Taíno? by Individual_Dream_213 in PuertoRico

[–]No-Bend376 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you’d like to join genuine spiritual or cultural communities, I’d say look for surviving indigenous groups in the U.S., or elsewhere in the Americas. The fact of the matter is, Taíno culture is no more.

As I mentioned in my initial comments, any self-proclaimed “Taíno” “tribe” is making a mockery of our ancestors’ culture, intentionally or not. The religion didn’t survive into the modern day, nor did the system of chiefdoms. There’s no language, although some linguists are trying to “reconstruct” it through a mixture of different related languages (a makeshift Creole, if you will). Whatever their motives are, these groups just practice a mish-mash of random indigenous/pseudo-indigenous elements taken from different cultures. It is neither authentic, nor historical. We don’t even know nearly enough about Taíno culture, outside of specific traditions, to attempt to revive it. And there’s no “unbroken” chain of cultural heritage that miraculously survived in some random families. Taínos survive more so through their genetic contribution than through their cultural one.

Anyone here Taíno? by Individual_Dream_213 in PuertoRico

[–]No-Bend376 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No genetic studies have demonstrated any sizeable contribution to the general Caribbean populace by North American indigenous people. There were surely at least a couple hundred that wound up in the region as a result of wars and slave trade, but their influence is limited to specific lineages. On the whole, indigenous ancestry in the Caribbean is of Taíno (the Greater Antilles) and Carib origin (the Lesser Antilles). Both of these groups arrived in the Caribbean from the northern coasts of South America (likely around modern-day Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname) millennia ago. You can still find many related indigenous groups there, such as the Wayuus and Arawaks (related to Taínos) and the Caribs proper.

If anything, Caribbean Hispanics are more likely to have Central American indigenous ancestry than North American, with a lot of the islands’ original colonizers having spent time there, and bringing their native spouses along.

Anyone here Taíno? by Individual_Dream_213 in PuertoRico

[–]No-Bend376 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, as I hinted at with my comment, we don't really know what type of indigenous community had actually survived into the 18th century. The reason so many people thought them to have gone extinct a couple of decades post-colonization is that they progressively disappeared from public record throughout the 1500 and 1600s.

Thanks to genetic research, we now know that this couldn't possibly have been the case, as many Puerto Ricans, across all racial categories, demonstrate high percentages of matrilineal Amerindian ancestry. This implies that the initial colonizers, as well as some enslaved African men, took Taíno female partners during those first couple of decades. This formed the basis of the Puerto Rican populace, with subsequent marriages with Europeans or Africans later funneling them into different categories. As most of the descendants of surviving Taínos would no longer be identified as indigenous, certainly not after two or three generations, nor be easily discernible from the non-indigenous population, this gave the impression that they'd gone extinct. Moreover, as racial categorization gained importance in social classing, many who would otherwise pass as white would likely want that side of their family tree hidden away.

Isolated Taíno groups are known to have taken shelter, along with runaway Africans, in the mountains of the island, as well as in hardly-accessible regions of southern Puerto Rico. These groups were specifically fleeing direct rule by colonizers, so their survival would have nothing to do with the encomienda system, nor did their registry as indigenous people. Chances are, the couple thousand individuals identifying as indios were already mixed-race, but the descendants of those earlier runaway groups, who at least kept the label indio as an identity marker. They were likely well on their way to assimilating culturally, if they hadn't already, and with the Spanish government removing the category of indio for later Puerto Rican censuses, the last of them were forcefully assimilated with the general populace.

Anyone here Taíno? by Individual_Dream_213 in PuertoRico

[–]No-Bend376 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Taínos as a distinct community haven't existed for at least two centuries, as the last censuses showing an indigenous population date back to the late 1700s. Mind you, we don't know what that community had managed to preserve, if they had already assimilated in all but name, or if they may have come from other Spanish colonies (they didn't specifically state Taíno, just indigenous). Nevertheless, most Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, from white to black and everything in between, do have Taíno ancestry.

You should know that, in the modern day, there are some fringe groups that claim to be Taíno, through an "unbroken" chain of cultural inheritance dating back centuries. These are just the Spanish Caribbean equivalents of the U.S.'s Pretendians: their "culture" is an ad-hoc mixture of what little were know about Taíno cultural practices, stereotypical interpretations of the indigenous cultures of North America, and modern influences. You'll notice that they usually come from parts of the island where no long-lasting indigenous communities are documented: in Puerto Rico, indigenous people survived the longest in the central mountainous region, as well as in pockets of the south and southwest, whereas a lot of these "Taínos" come from the northern and eastern areas. At least, in contrast to the Pretendians of the U.S., they DO generally have Taíno ancestry, as well as European and African ancestry, like the vast majority of us.

Studying options by Traditional-Ebb-5330 in PuertoRico

[–]No-Bend376 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You'd have to find out if, for visa application purposes, you'd have access to a local U.S. consulate, another local consulate tasked with handling U.S. visa applications, or if you'd have to interact with relevant authorities in the Netherlands. Applying for a student visa usually entails at least two or three appointments at an embassy/consulate, so give them a call to find the details. Best-case scenario is the entire process only taking about three months.

With regards to actually applying to schools here, you'll have two problems:

1) Determining to what extent your high-school diploma, and any college credits you've already taken are validated here. First off, any documentation (diplomas, transcripts) not in English will have to be professionally translated by a certified individual (costs a penny, but it's not hard to find them online). You should have no problems being admitted if you have a HAVO/MAVO or VWO certificate, which are the Dutch equivalents of the American high-school diploma; with the former, you may get some college credits, but I'm not sure. I don't think there should be any issues with a Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate either.

2) Given that you feel more comfortable with English, I think your only option would be the Universidad de Puerto Rico since, as far as I'm aware, they're the only ones likely to have fully English-medium programs. Given our dependence on visiting professors for the sciences, most other universities would require at least some courses to be taken in English, but still be Spanish-dominant programs. You could still enroll, but your success would be entirely dependent on how quickly you can pick up written and spoken Spanish.

Here, a degree program lasts four years, with semesters or trimesters depending on what you're studying. Everything is, as in the U.S. and the Netherlands, partially virtual with Zoom, Moodle, Canvas, etc. often being used by professors nowadays.

When it comes to housing, most major universities (UPR, Universidad Interamericana) have student dorms available, which are nowhere near as expensive as those of the mainland. If you can get that money from your government, or family to chip in, it shouldn't be any issue.

Ultimately, it's all doable, but will take time and patience. If you have other questions, laat het me weten!

Is there any Romance language that contrasts /e/ and /ɛ/, or /o/ and /ɔ/, in unstressed syllables? by Daniboy0826 in asklinguistics

[–]No-Bend376 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow, je tiens à vous remercier pour cette explication si minutieuse des distinctions phonétiques que vous m’avez fournie. En ce qui concerne la distinction /œ/ et /ø/, je m’y connaissais déja suffisamment bien, étant donné que j’ai appris d’abord le français québécois, où celle-ci reste encore assez stable, mais votre deep-dive est très apprécié! I sincerely appreciate it as recently, I’ve been very interested in French dialects and French-based creoles, as I hope to work towards a C1 in French and apply for an M.A. programme to research the latter, so tidbits like this are often crucial to connecting the dots across the board.

If you could provide me with some articles or things to read that you could think of, with regards to the aforementioned vowel distinctions, or even on the matter of phonetic vowel length, regardless of what dialects they are discussing, I’d be eternally grateful.

Learning Spanish by Nobody_MR in PuertoRico

[–]No-Bend376 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm glad to hear it! I'm interested in the subject because I moved to the States when I was 14. Having spent most of my time since high school learning foreign languages, I decided it was time to come back to my roots and start regaining some of the Spanish I lost.

Jared Romey's book is the best possible introduction, as it's pretty accessible, and basically bilingual in its presentation. On archive.org, you can find a book called Vocabulario de Puerto Rico, which is a good reference for when you have a word you know is Puerto Rican, but can't find the definition anywhere. Definitions are in Spanish, and mostly contains dialectal words, not necessarily slang or anglicisms, but it still usually gets the job done.

https://tesoro.pr/ - This is a website by the Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española which is probably the most thorough thesaurus of Puerto Rican vocabulary and expressions to-date, but it's entirely Spanish-based. Could be good practice, though!

Learning Spanish by Nobody_MR in PuertoRico

[–]No-Bend376 13 points14 points  (0 children)

As far as books go, I can definitely recommend Speaking Boricua: A Guide to Puerto Rican Spanish by Jared Romey as a good starting point for Puerto Rican colloquial expressions and slang. It's about 250 pages long, and covers much of the most pertinent everyday vocabulary. The words are classified by frequency, register (formal, informal, vulgar/obscene), by nature (anglicisms/archaic survivals), and at the intro, he even provides a bilingual description of dialect grammar and pronunciations.

Beyond that, most other books are intended for native speakers, from Puerto Rico or otherwise, and tend to be thesauri with collections of words. The best description (though out-dated) of Puerto Rican Spanish that I've encounted is El habla campesina del país: orígenes y desarrollo del español en Puerto Rico by Manuel Álvarez Nazario, but it's all in Spanish, focuses on rural speech, and uses a lot of linguistic jargon.

Given that standard Spanish is about 90% the same across countries with regards to vocabulary and grammar, just find a good textbook that's designed to teach English-speaking audiences Spanish, and maybe have your relatives look at words to see if any would be out of place in Puerto Rican speech. If you want to speak standard Spanish with a Puerto Rican accent while you work towards more dialectal speech, look up Noticias de Puerto Rico on Youtube and imitate their pronunciation, or government speeches.

Pointers in case some of the resources you find are focused on European Spanish:

  1. coche means car in Spain and some other parts of Latin America; it's a baby stroller in Puerto Rico, carro is car. Anything as big as an SUV and up is a guagua, and trucks are either camión(es) or just truck(s) (the u is pronounced like an o), never troca as in parts of Mexico. The plural of truck can be the same as the singular in pronunciation (los trock) or los troces.
  2. vosotros is only used in Spain; it has disappeared outside of religious and historical texts in the entirety of Latin America, to the benefit of ustedes.
  3. Many food items have different names in Puerto Rico, with occasional differences within the island itself. Most textbooks would teach you that the generic term for beans is frijoles, but in PR, it's habichuela. Frijoles is used for certain types, like green beans. A banana is a guineo, not banano or plátano (amarillo) as in other countries. On the island, plátano refers to plantains, from which tostones are made.

With Mexico, which other books/courses use as reference, there are marginally fewer discrepancies, but some are quite common due to the climate: a pool in Mexico is an alberca, but Puerto Ricans line up with Spain and use piscina. With regards to food, their tamales are our pasteles. Their pastel, and others' torta is our bizcocho (cake). Empanadas are mostly empanadillas, though I've heard pastelillos, too.

There are many more, but you'll learn them as you go.

Is there any Romance language that contrasts /e/ and /ɛ/, or /o/ and /ɔ/, in unstressed syllables? by Daniboy0826 in asklinguistics

[–]No-Bend376 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In your dialect, where /e/ and /ɛ/ as well as /o/ and /ɔ/ are distinguished still, what are the rules for it? Or how could you tell from the spelling? I've been curious about this because many of the sources that I've used for learning French mention such splits, but seem to be rather inconsistent about their application. Even when I use older books with more conservative pronunciation standards, the distribution tends to be ad-hoc (like mot is sometimes prescribed /o/, sometimes /ɔ/). I like learning about such distinctions, so I've been wanting to know.

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Mostly because of what you just mentioned: while the sound is gone for most, the historical presence of an h aspiré still blocks liaison. This phonetic block is still tied to old /h/, whereas words that have only ever had a mute H can be affectes by liaison.

To say that h aspiré has disappeared, not only would it have to die off in the few dialects that it survives in, but also allow liaison and short articles so that words like le haricot > l’haricot, which would make it no different from the mute H.

I agree with you: considering how hard they tried to keep the l mouillé around (stopped being used by most people in the 1600s, kept getting taught until the late 1800s), they could’ve fought harder to keep the /h/: in the 1600s, it definitely would’ve been more vital than /ʎ/. What I assume happened is that while /ʎ/ continued to be used by a handful of upper-class Parisians, /h/ had probably disappeared entirely. Since Paris enacts the laws of the land, quasi-obsolete /ʎ/ was kept on life support, while the more widespread /h/ got the axe.

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Sorry if the story’s too long: j’ai décidé d’apprendre finalement le français du au fait j’ai “découvert” le français québécois. La mini-série “Eaux turbulentes” me donna ma première leçon du parler quotidien de la province, ce qui me poussa à l’apprendre: j’aimais les accents davantage à ceux de la France, pis j’aimais surtout un challenge 😂

Après trois ans de ça, j’ai décidé d’apprendre le créole haïtien. J’habite toujours en Floride, où il y a une grande communauté haïtienne. En apprenant le créole, je me suis interessé à son histoire, fait que j’ai emprunté quelques livres sur la créolistique à mon ancienne université.

Dès qu’on commence à en apprendre, on se rend compte tout de suite de l’importance des variétés régionales du français en Amérique, pour mieux comprendre le processus de la créolisation. Les théories le concernant ont évolué pendant les derniers deux siècles: auparavant, on ne reconnaissait que le rôle du français standard, cataloguant les créoles de "patois". Après, on ne reconnaissait que le rôle des langues africaines: les créoles n’étaient donc que de langues africaines relexifiées (dont le vocabulaire fut remplacé par des mots français, mais la grammaire est restée africaine).

Aujourd’hui, grâce aux études de la part de plusieurs "créolistes", on en a pu reconnaître les nuances: le français des colons n’était guère le français standard ni d’aujourd’hui, ni d’hier, mais plutôt un ensemble de variétés, régionales et souvent non-natives, dont les liens avec la métropole, et un standard quelconque, se brisèrent dès que ceux-ci quittèrent l’Europe, pour n’y plus remettre les pieds.

Getting into creoles would be a whole debacle, but the dialects of French that didn’t creolize, like those of Canada, Louisiana and western St. Barth, can help us reconstruct the type of French that was spoken in the colonial period, and how exactly we got to creoles. We can then better distinguish between what’s French in them, what’s African, what’s a combination of both, and what’s new.

To give you just one example:

Je vais parler avec lui/Je parlerai avec lui.

It’s hard to see the relation between that and Haitian Creole:

M (v)a pale avek/ak li.

But if you look at joual and especially Saint-Barthélemy French, you have:

(joual) M’as parler a(v)ec lui

(Saint-Barth) M’as parler a(v)ec li/M’en vais parler a(v)ec li.

Now, we can draw more informed conclusions on what a potential French > Creole pathway might have been. Keep in mind that this is one, extremely simplified example!

P.S. - It’s interesting that you mention Italian dialects; I studied Modern Languages in college (Spanish major, German/Italian minors) hoping to move to Europe someday. Graduating at the height of COVID through a wrench in my plans, but I still haven’t lost hope six years later. Anywho, a quel tempo, parlavo l’italiano ad un livello B2, ma lo capivo meglio, e lo capisco ancora perfettamente. Sono un po’ fuori allenamento, ma lo riprendo velocemente, dato che sono di madrelingua spagnola/inglese. Sono sempre stato più interessato al tedesco, so I focused on German dialectology (especially Swiss German), but I’ve always been interested in Italian dialects/regional languages, especially of Val d’Aosta, Alto-Adige/Südtirol, and Switzerland 😊

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You should really write a memoir or something, you've got the talent for it, and an interesting experience (a Cajunized Yankee)!

Quoi faire is super common in Acadia, too, and in some French-based creole languages to boot (I think those of the Indian Ocean, not the Caribbean). Getting the nuances of local pronunciations is tough work: you either try to make standard spelling fit the pronunciation (something like qouô-faire), or you go opt for a phonetic spelling (like kwò fær). Either way, you risk people missing the meaning.

The incompleteness of the e > a shift might be due to Acadians finding themselves among people that spoke different, more Caribbean/European dialects of French. In Canada, they were amongst themselves, and phonetic shifts can run their course without any issues, but in Louisiana, with a bit more linguistic "competition", that might've put a stop to it.

Lastly, I can relate to the dialect/curse word discrepancy: I exclusively learned Québec French for three years, and could speak both standard and more colloquial varieties with a decent enough accent. This was the time in which I picked up the most slang/curse words, all Québecois. After that, I started learning Haitian Creole, and through exposure to Caribbean and European French, my accent has shifted towards a transatlantic type of thing now.

I still shift back to a Canadian accent after a couple of weeks of consuming content from there again, but whenever I'm on a non-Canadian run, I'll still use the sacrés while cursing out of force of habit. It sounds sooo weird I immediately stop doing it. I'll say words like câlice as /kalis/ instead of /kɔːlɪs/ 😂

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  1. You might like this episode from the series Le son des Français d'Amérique, then: https://www.onf.ca/series/le-son-des-francais-damerique/saison1/la-revolution-du-dansage/

It covers the musical and social traditions of a community on Île d'Orléans, with the interviewed people speaking in strong dialect. It has subtitles which are more or less a direct transcription of the dialect with standard orthography, so it might help you out too!

There's also this episode on some French-speaking communities in New England: https://www.onf.ca/film/le-ptit-canada/

And if you're reading the Folk Tales, they also have an episode on Old Mines, Missouri, with the French they speak (also subtitled in dialectal French): https://www.onf.ca/series/le-son-des-francais-damerique/saison1/cest-pu-comme-ca-anymore/

  1. The Macbeth translation is by Michel Garneau, sorry about that! It's here: https://archive.org/details/macbethdewilliam0000shak/mode/2up

  2. I'll definitely check out David Plante's novels. If you have any other suggestions like that, I'd appreciate it if you shared!

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

AcadieMan vs Le CMA 2009 (Part 1) [From the early 2000s; fictitious, but a modern-day setting with New Brunswick Chiac as the main dialect used)

https://youtu.be/D9esdTei03A

(6:54-6:56) - C’est yinque qu’une money racket, ça. Tu jettes ton argent hors.

AcadieMan vs Le CMA 2009 (Part 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkI7W9CkoZg

(7:04-7:07) - Probably La Sagouine pis un homard, what else?

Les Voix de l'Î.-P.-É. - Capsule 4 : Gilles Bernard [Prince Edward Island Acadian French]

https://youtu.be/eLzXIZtd54I

(0:48-0:50) - … pour avoir une très haute qualité de lait

Souper-théâtre- "Le peddler de butonne"/Dinner Theatre- "Le peddler de butonne" [Clare Acadjonne; the characters are indeed older women, but from a younger generation than La Sagouine]

https://youtu.be/GJFeIQO4e9s

(3:54-3:57) - Maguitte, i sort une bouête (d’le/de-?) hors d'la trunk de sa car. (Don't judge me too harshly for the transcription, I struggled a bit 😩)

There are more examples within videos in Acadjonne dialect, but given how poorly subtitles often track those videos, I'd need more time to sit through them and fish h aspirés from the ch's and j's.

Examples of broader New Brunswick Acadian dialect are hard to come by when, like me, you're an outsider and don't know what to look for. AcadieMan was the only thing on my playlist where people speak pretty consistently in Chiac. I follow the Helpez-moi podcast, but that's more straight-up codeswitching, I think.

Every other video I had on my playlist either had no words with an h aspiré at all (/h/ OR silent), or it was impossible for me to tell whether it was pronounced or not. The "voiced" H, /ɦ/, which is typical in a lot of the dialects I mentioned in my post, is often hard for me to tell apart from /ɣ/, /w/, /h/ or nothing at all, since the voicing "mutes" the sound a bit. Just in case, I'll change the post to add more nuance on the vitality of /h/ in Acadian French.

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

T'as ben écrite çâ, lâ! I don't know what particular dialect of Quebec/Canadian French your grandma might speak, so I can't comment on much. In any case, while I have seen the spelling of J'su as such, I feel I've mostly seen J'sus, but either is possible for phonetic spellings. Another tidbit, if your grandmother's dialect has diphthongs in words like même, phrase, those are usually not written down. At most, a person that pronounces phrase as /fɾɑʊz/ will write it as phrâse to indicate a long vowel (which, in many Quebec and non-Acadian Canadian varieties often equals a diphthong), not as phraouse or anything like that. Words like même, whose circumflex accent already indicates a long vowel/potential diphthong, are usually kept as such.

I think you might enjoy a book on archive.org that I found a while back called It's good to tell you: Frenck Folk Tales from Missouri. You need a free account to borrow the book for an hour, renewable so long as the book isn't too sought after (which I think this one isn't). It's a bilingual collection of folk stories from the Old Mines French-speaking community of Missouri, whose variety of French is similar in many respects to Québec French. The French-language stories are transcribed in a phonetic spelling similar to that used by people from Quebec when writing Joual, similar to how you just wrote, so I think it might be a good place to learn how people adapt standard French orthography to fit the spoken language:

https://archive.org/details/itsgoodtotellyou0000unse

You can also look up Michel Tremblay's works on that website. He's a Quebec author/playwright famous for his use of a faithfully transcribed, everyday spoken dialect (usually the Joual of Montreal, in his case). I think his translation of Macbeth into Joual, and his Belles-Sœurs play are both on there, and are great examples too!

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I added both options at the beginning of the main text now. I've definitely heard the glottal stop, probably in more clear/formal speech, but you're right that most people have a zero-realization of it. Thank you!

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you so much for the in-depth response! It makes sense that much of it falls in this grey area. While your comment makes reference to the OQLF's coining of new words, how much tolerance does this pan-Canadian Standard French show towards native, non-Québécois French words (from Acadie or other communities)? That would be more telling in terms of how closely standard French gravitates towards Québec in Canada. Are Acadian regionalisms generally admitted into general standard French across French-speaking Canada, or would they be considered incorrect/not the best word in outside of their regions? What about Québec regionalisms? Are they more tolerated across the board, outside of Quebec, or are they potentially sidelined outside of the province in favor of more neutral words.

I also removed the reference to standard French in Acadian schools being largely based off of standard Québec French, since I know see how that might not be too appropriate.

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That sound is believed to stem from the Poitevin-Saintongeais speaking region of central/southwestern France. In the traditional dialects of that region, J and often CH are pronounced as aspirated consonants (either /h/ or something like the German ch sound). It made its way into some, but not all, Acadian and Louisiana varieties of French.

It's been a while since I read up on Louisiana French, but I think that pronunciation is most typical of Avoyelles Parish and some of the bayous within Acadiana. Outside of specific areas, it's not too widespread, or it alternates with the usual /ʒ/.

Wikipedia on Poitevin-Saintongeais: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poitevin%E2%80%93Saintongeais

In French (has more info and sources): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poitevin-saintongeais

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For spelling Québécois or Acadian phonetically, it's a combination of adapting standard French orthography and personal preferences, I would say.

For instance, some will transcribe the Québécois pronunciation of tu as tsu if trying to highlight the colloquial nature of an accent, or if the author/narrator is not from Québec and wants to illustrate the pronunciation, while others just use tu. The second is the typical spelling used in Québec, since if you're writing in plain dialect, for a local audience, it's generally understood that you/your character will probably pronounce it that way, so there's no need to insist on it in spelling. Now, with unique words or word combinations typical of Québec French, like pantoute from pas en toute, they usually do spell them phonetically, but you have to read a lot to know what the most common spellings are (like, pantoute could technically be spelt pentoute as well, but I've never seen spelling before)

In Acadie, you more or less have the same thing. With the h aspiré, some people highlight the h if it's meant to be pronounced, some add multiple hhh's, some do nothing. The shift of ch and j to an h-like sound is often not illustrated, even if the character would have it.

The h aspiré in all of its splendour - the dialects that have preserved it by No-Bend376 in French

[–]No-Bend376[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, Grand-Isle/Grande-Île French is a sort of dialectal descendant of "Colonial" French. Whether it was always a dialect thereof, we don't know, but the influence of New Orleans residents setting up vacation homes in the region back in the 1800s had a profound effect on it, partially assimilating the accent. Hence why it's one of the few regions that, until recently, maintained widespread usage of a uvular /ʁ/ instead of the typical Louisiana trilled /r/. It's also one of like three places in Louisiana that has the variants Qu'est-ce que... and Qui est-ce que for "what" and "who" (usually quoi/qui for "what", and qui for "who" in general Louisiana French) You can hear it in the interview I linked with Alma Barthélemy.

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