....
But I'm probably extra snotty since I'm a francophone who studied Parisian French rather than Québécois. Because why would I want to learn the pigfucker version of French? I take enough stink for speaking the language of France in the first place.
The speakers of Québécois have said that theirs is the purer form of French. They are probably right. Pure =/= useful nor comprehensible though.
What I've seen of Quebec French does not imply that it is particularly pure. I've read French literature in French which was published 300 years ago and it was still thoroughly comprehensible to me, but many of the constructs of modern Quebec French leave me baffled as a speaker of standard Parisian.
I suspect their argument is akin to the claims that American English is a purer form than British. American English is necessarily very conservative and retains many linguistic elements from about 400 years ago which have long since been lost in Britain. The reason for this conservation is because we're a nation of immigrants who cling to a standard very strongly as a means of unification and identification (whereas people in Britain essentially allow their language to diverge to identify themselves as separate entities).
No doubt Quebec French contains many similar traits with the French that was spoken 300-400 years ago for the same reason.
Mexican Spanish has a similar relationship with the standard Spanish of Spain. One of my cousins is bilingual and spent a lot of time in Mexico but since she learned a more academic version of the language, she is regularly mistaken for speaking Castilian. It's probably similar to how my extremely precise form of speaking (a combination of my being partially deaf and overcompensating for it and being highly educated in the English language) is regularly mistaken for British.
Have I mentioned that I study language a lot?
