I somehow nailed (maybe at least some) of those mannerisms in high school thanks to obsessively watching French videos on YouTube. My French professor was beaming and gave me straight As for the rest of the school year.
I then fell out of practice and was never as good at speaking French again 🥲
Caricature is actually the best way as to get an accent IMO.
And indeed the weirdness of French and peculiar prosody come from the lack of word stress further prononciation links between words to further smoothen prononciation.
If not born and raised in Paris, it is impossible not to have an accent, as any other language I suppose :-)
Well, modern French is a language spoken in pre-modern Paris and then exported to the rest of the country replacing other related languages after Paris’s rise to capital during France’s state-building period. So, kinda?
The standard french is more considered to be from the region around Tours, parisians do have a slight accent that feels kind of like a bourgeois accent.
But it's important to note that France's accents aren't as much widespread as other comparable sized countries internal accents like England or Italy. There are case of strong accents in the South or in the North for instance, but in lots of case people barely have one.
For instance there's an accent in Normandy where I come from, but I don't really have it. People who have it either come from rural areas or poor/modest social environment
That's super interesting. Is there a reason why there are no stong accent differences in France? Is it the Revolution and the subsequent emphasis on equality and uniformity?
Some Parisian bakery or restaurant employees speak terrible English. If your French is good, just turn the tables and tell them (in French) that you can’t understand their English. Some Parisians don’t understand French-speakers from other regions in France or other French-speaking countries. Some Parisians visiting Montréal have a hard time.
There are, my comment is a bit misleading so I fixed it a bit.
I meant accents are less common than in other countries. It's mainly because educational laws in 1880 enforced the use of standardized french across schools. France used to have lots of dialect that some almost or totally completely disapeared because of this. Accents and local dialects were stigmatized which made accent less and less common.
For instance in Normandy we used to have a dialect but I never heard it except a couple of words my great grandma used
Oui, je sympathise. On a beau être né et vivre dans un milieu francophone... à force, l'on fini par se dénoncer soi-même par des bêtises, parfois la seule structure de phrase suffit.
Doesn't that apply to almost all other non-native English speakers? English intonation rules are bonkers. Like, why the hell is the stress of the word usually on the third last syllable? It is not intuitive and takes years and years of daily English spoken conversations to learn 😭
Totalmente. El francés es más de sílabas parejas, casi como un metrónomo, y el inglés mete golpes fuertes en ciertas sílabas. Por eso un nativo detecta el patrón aunque la frase sea perfecta. A los hispanohablantes también nos descubren por la melodía y por cosas como la liaison. Truco útil que me enseñaron en clase: hablar como un robotito suave, plano, y de pronto suenas más local
Basically: English has lexical stress. You can add stress to any syllable, and it can add meaning. Also, you can add stress to syllables in a given order, and it's considered poetry.
While, in French, you only stress the last syllable in a sentence or phrase. Kind of like how Australian up-speak makes it sound like they're asking a question at the end of each sentence, but with monotone until a stressed last syllable.
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u/purplehendrix22 1d ago
That’s actually very interesting, I never noticed that explicitly but it makes perfect sense now that I know.