Re: Apologetic for accent in English?! (was: Hello to you all!)

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Christophe Grandsire [mailto:christophe.grandsire@FREE.FR]
|| En réponse à "Karapcik, Mike" <Karapcik@...>:
|
| >         Almost everyone I've known from Canada claims the
|  > French view those
| > from Quebec as evil degenerate troglodytes who exist only
| to bastardize "The Language". The one Canadian friend I've had
|
| Strange... when was that? I ask it because nowadays the
| Quebec accent is
| actually liked by French people. They consider it funny, but
| in a positive way.
| Christophe.

        Not recently. Nuitz's trip was in Summer 99. (He actually loved
rural France, and kept talking about going back. He grew up in Quebec.)
Richard, my previous boss, was there in the mid 80's (US education system
French). Our old neighbors (from western Canada, Saskatchewan?) would have
been early 80's. Those were the people I've known reasonably well. It's also
easy to meet people from Canada here in Florida, so there have been numerous
casual conversations over the years. Because of Canadian tourism,
retirement, and snowbirds (winter residents), French is the fastest growing
language in Florida. (It's still spoken by numbers orders of magnitude
smaller than Spanish, but proportionally, the speaker base is growing
faster.)

        Actually, one of the professors here at Moffitt is moving to Lions
France. He's Greek, but he was on the French Debate team in college. He said
that when he was there interviewing, he noticed a revival of sorts in
regional dialects and languages. He said he heard radio broadcasts in
Provençal and Brenton for the first time. Perhaps things are changing?

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