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mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

by Fluffdaddy

Phlegmish posted:

Visiting North America has never interested me, I guess I subconsciously don't find it exotic enough to justify the expense and effort, but if I did Montreal would definitely be at the top of the list.
Yeah definitely reconsider, it's not SEA-cheap but definitely worth it. Not only the cities but also nature stuff that you just can't see in Europe or pretty much anywhere else.

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Count Roland
Oct 6, 2013

BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:

Weren't they having problems with French people moving there because its "Cheap" and the French can't concieve of a France with multiple cities. I remember reading several articles about Montrealites complaining about French international-Gentrification.

There are neighbourhoods where you hear Parisian french more commonly than Quebec french. Which to me is ok, because Quebec french sounds extremely ugly to my ears and is harder for me to understand.

CommonShore
Jun 6, 2014

A true renaissance man


Phlegmish posted:

Visiting North America has never interested me, I guess I subconsciously don't find it exotic enough to justify the expense and effort, but if I did Montreal would definitely be at the top of the list.

The thing that North America would have for someone like you is wilderness. We don't have 800 year-old cathedrals and 2000 year old ruins etc, but there's close-to virgin wilderness stretching to nearly unfathomable extents especially once you get to 51 deg N.

Starks
Sep 24, 2006

BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:

Weren't they having problems with French people moving there because its "Cheap" and the French can't concieve of a France with multiple cities. I remember reading several articles about Montrealites complaining about French international-Gentrification.

It’s not really that cheap, a lot of French people are moving there because unemployment is high for young people in France, only to be disgusted by the food and bastardized language: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/world/canada/montreal-quebec-french-in-canada.html

I don’t care what the French snobs say though I think the food in Montreal is amazing.

BIG FLUFFY DOG
Feb 16, 2011

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.


CommonShore posted:

The thing that North America would have for someone like you is wilderness. We don't have 800 year-old cathedrals and 2000 year old ruins etc, but there's close-to virgin wilderness stretching to nearly unfathomable extents especially once you get to 51 deg N.

Also if you show up with a european accent everyone will be your best friend and give you free stuff because they're so excited someone came all the way from Belgium to see Cincinatti! (Probably doesn't apply in places which get Euro tourists all the time like New York and Florida but it might I don't know.)

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
The funny thing to me is that, as an American, I think the exact same thing as Phlegmish about Europe. I mean, yeah, castles and history museums are pretty cool, but like without the wilderness and natural wonders, it's just too similar to the USA to justify the cost of traveling and staying there.

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
The way québécois think about France is pretty interesting. The pop culture memory of being "abandoned" by France (in favour of keeping the sugar islands) is still alive, québécois have told me. Also they think french swear words sound like dumb baby swears. They seem more annoyed at my accent than the way americans and anglo-canadians will go starry-eyed at hearing a brit.

That's also why on those ethnographic maps of North America you'll see french-canadian listed as a separate category from french.

Jehde
Apr 21, 2010

The difference between quebec french and metropolitan french is always kind of neat. Quebec favours using archaic words for things, because it sounds more properly french. Where as metropolitan french favours adopting modern english language loanwords into their own for new concepts, for convenience I guess. However, metropolitan french is a lot more by the books overall, and while they use english loanwords, they're adopted officially into french. Where as in Quebec the merging of languages happens a lot more organically with stuff like franglish.

E: Also for flag chat, the flag of quebec is the old flag of the Kingdom of France (with fleur de lis for extra frenchness) because the founding of the province of quebec predates the found of the french republic and tricolour.

Jehde fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jun 16, 2020

Kreez
Oct 18, 2003

Phlegmish posted:

I find Montreal to be a fascinating city because it's basically Brussels, except French is the historically subjugated language and the assimilation process got stuck somewhere halfway, while not (yet) having been fully reversed either. Very clear geographical divide as well, which is rare for a single metropolitan region in the 21st century. There's just so much to study in a sociological sense.

In Brussels, where Dutch is natively spoken by only a negligible part of the population, Dutch-language schools are very popular in a relative sense, to the tune of 30% of the schoolgoing population being enrolled in one. That's mostly because there is a huge difference in terms of professional success between bilingual people and unilingual French speakers, which hasn't gone unnoticed by ambitious parents (so the correlation also has something of a chicken-egg dynamic). I've said this before, but I used to work at a place that employed several perfectly bilingual descendents of immigrants.

Interesting you mention the very clear geographical divide, I found the divide in Belgium to be far more "strict", but only had the perspective of a tourist staying in Brussels and making some day trips into Flanders to see war and beer things.

As an example, in a major chunk (most?) of Montreal, including most of the interesting areas, even if there is a dominant language, upon meeting a stranger you'll go through quick, generally unconscious, language calibration to figure out who speaks what best (ignoring any power imbalances, like the customer is always going to get to choose if they want, if you're not a dick you're going to speak French for sure in certain sensitive neighbourhoods, you're going to speak your in-law's preferred language, etc.) . Being super used to that way of doing things, it took me a few days to stop trying to make sure the server/shopkeeper in Brussels spoke French before just asking what I wanted. And then you take the train 10 minutes in any direction and the french just completely disappears, to be replaced with 100% Dutch. And it only took me one visit to a shop in Flanders to determine that there is no need to ask whether they preferred french or english. In Canada, the french just sort of gradually fades out and the english fades in as you travel from Quebec, through Montreal, through Ottawa, then to say Toronto. Montreal itself is somewhat similar if you were to walk from the eastern tip to the western tip (ignoring some enclaves here and there).

Anyway, because of the different way Belgium deals with being a 50/50 country than Montreal does, I find it massively interesting, and Brussels remains one of my favourite places to visit, and I feel the need to stick up for it whenever people are dumping on it.

Phlegmish
Jul 2, 2011



Kreez posted:

Interesting you mention the very clear geographical divide, I found the divide in Belgium to be far more "strict", but only had the perspective of a tourist staying in Brussels and making some day trips into Flanders to see war and beer things.

As an example, in a major chunk (most?) of Montreal, including most of the interesting areas, even if there is a dominant language, upon meeting a stranger you'll go through quick, generally unconscious, language calibration to figure out who speaks what best (ignoring any power imbalances, like the customer is always going to get to choose if they want, if you're not a dick you're going to speak French for sure in certain sensitive neighbourhoods, you're going to speak your in-law's preferred language, etc.) . Being super used to that way of doing things, it took me a few days to stop trying to make sure the server/shopkeeper in Brussels spoke French before just asking what I wanted. And then you take the train 10 minutes in any direction and the french just completely disappears, to be replaced with 100% Dutch. And it only took me one visit to a shop in Flanders to determine that there is no need to ask whether they preferred french or english. In Canada, the french just sort of gradually fades out and the english fades in as you travel from Quebec, through Montreal, through Ottawa, then to say Toronto. Montreal itself is somewhat similar if you were to walk from the eastern tip to the western tip (ignoring some enclaves here and there).

Anyway, because of the different way Belgium deals with being a 50/50 country than Montreal does, I find it massively interesting, and Brussels remains one of my favourite places to visit, and I feel the need to stick up for it whenever people are dumping on it.

I should be clearer, when mentioning that geographical divide, I'm comparing the respective metropolitan areas of Montreal and Brussels. It seems to be an east-west division in Montreal, but maybe those French areas are actually quite sub/exurban and they're heavily French because they're further away from the Anglo-Canadian border? In Brussels, outside of a few neighborhoods and the area surrounding the main VUB campus, there's a very uniform linguistic distribution (with French being the lingua franca almost everywhere).
French influence also fades out gradually as you move into Flanders, but in a much more concentric fashion and I do suppose it's more abrupt than in Canada. Any given municipality that borders Brussels will have a ton of French speakers (sometimes the majority, causing political tensions), then you go to the next (Flemish) municipality over and francophones might be a small minority.

If we're going to compare things on a national level, one thing that is important to note is that, unlike Montreal in Quebec, Brussels is not a part of Flanders. It is its own entity in most ways, even if it's completely surrounded by Flanders. That really does mean something in the context of Belgian federalism and the Belgian constitution, which takes territory quite seriously, and it's probably the main reason the division is more strict.
If you speak Dutch in a Brussels store, it's a complete dice roll and there's almost no way to predict what will happen unless you somehow know that the person behind the counter is Flemish. Reactions will range from replies in perfect (Brabantian) Dutch, to puzzled looks, to them practically spitting in your face. In Flanders, conversely, you're usually better off speaking English than French. Not only is it less potentially offensive, the younger generation at least speaks much better English than French. In Wallonia, you can try to speak Dutch I guess as a joke or to make a point or something, but you won't be able to communicate with 95% of the locals.

That's one of the reasons my feelings of vague repulsion towards Juncker turned into intense dislike over the years. A year or two ago, he made a statement in an interview along the lines of saying it was a pity that so many Flemings 'refuse' to speak French to him whenever he vacations on the Belgian coast. Not only was it blatantly false (most restaurant/café owners there will happily speak French), it's also deeply ignorant. French in those coastal municipalities has exactly the same legal status as Swahili, or as Dutch in Wallonia, that is to say, none at all. Just like everywhere else, if you're a tourist and the locals speak your language, they're doing you a favor. Juncker knows less about the linguistic situation in Belgium than random goons in this thread. I think he's just extrapolating from the situation in Luxembourg, which is entirely different, but which I also don't know enough about to expound on.

Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Jun 16, 2020

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
In Montréal you can absolutely get by on just english, even in heavily francophone areas. People who don't speak functional english exist but you're not going to find them unless you're actively seeking them out, which doesn't, you know, happen. One rare exception might be immigrant-run restaurants and businesses where the staff primarily speak french and a third language but even then someone's going to speak english, just maybe (big maybe) not the first server to greet you. You're definitely better off with english in french areas than french in certain anglo areas.

That seems really different from Brussels.

I imagine english it's really hard for english to suffer the way dutch does just by virtue of being the global lingua (heh) franca.

Phlegmish
Jul 2, 2011



Unless I'm misunderstanding you, how is it all that different? It seems fairly comparable, just switch English and French with French and Dutch, respectively. If anything, French in Brussels is much more dominant than English appears to be in Montreal.

Kreez
Oct 18, 2003

Phlegmish posted:

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, how is it all that different? It seems fairly comparable, just switch English and French with French and Dutch, respectively. If anything, French in Brussels is much more dominant than English appears to be in Montreal.

I think you're thinking English in Montreal is comparable to French in Brussels, with French as the minority language in Montreal (like Dutch in Brussels)? It's the other way around, French is absolutely the dominant/default language in Montreal in general*. French in Brussels is most definitely more dominant than English in Montreal. I'm more interested in whether French in Brussels is more dominant than French is in Montreal as well. There's a lot more English used daily in Montreal than Dutch is used daily in Brussels, from what I can tell as a tourist, but I wouldn't get to see how language is used among a group of friends with different mother tongues, in offices, etc.

*While English is spoken fluently by more people in Montreal than French, that only gives it status as the default fall-back language for tourists, new immigrants, and stubborn anglos to communicate with francophones (who tend to all have english fluency ignoring the elderly).

Montreal is regarded as "very English" by the rest of Quebec, but that's just in comparison to the rest of the province which is functionally 100% French outside of the Montreal urban area (ignoring some weird enclaves here and there). With 2 generations coming up under the lanugage laws, Montreal is very much a French city that happens to have a small native Anglophone minority, as well as a large amount of english speaking due to the realities of globalization, but English is still very much the minority.

Kreez fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jun 16, 2020

Phlegmish
Jul 2, 2011



I would definitely say English is Canada is comparable to French in Belgium, but Montreal and Brussels are different, yes.

Mr. Fall Down Terror
Jan 24, 2018

by Fluffdaddy

Phlegmish posted:

Visiting North America has never interested me, I guess I subconsciously don't find it exotic enough to justify the expense and effort, but if I did Montreal would definitely be at the top of the list.

if you visit montreal you have to visit new orleans afterwards

Phlegmish
Jul 2, 2011



Snow France vs. Tropical France

Kreez
Oct 18, 2003

Phlegmish posted:

I would definitely say English is Canada is comparable to French in Belgium, but Montreal and Brussels are different, yes.

How out to lunch is the following thought experiment: In an alternative timeline where Brussels is the main economic capital of Belgium but part of Flanders politically (like Montreal was in Quebec and Canada until the 70s). Flemish nationalists come to power in Flanders and impose Dutch language protection laws in Brussels. 50 years later, most of the wealthy and powerful French have long left for Liege (or wherever), elevating that city to the dominant economic capital of Belgium. Brussels is mainly Dutch speaking, with a handful of bland French enclaves full of stubborn old middle class people. Most of the French speaking going on in the city centre is for the benefit of French speaking tourists (I guess in this alternative timeline French is the worldwide lingua Franca?) and due to recent influx of young people from France and Wallonia pushed out of the ever more expensive Paris and Liege and moving into the high quality housing stock in old neighbourhoods left behind by fleeing French 40-50 years ago. Their French speaking is somewhat balanced out by the native Dutch speakers and by recent heavy immigration from Dutch speakers fleeing unemployment and high costs in the Netherlands.

Or, opposite of that, if the 1980 "sovereignty-association" referendum had succeeded, yet Montreal had also somehow succeeded in seceding from Quebec itself as part of the negotiations between Quebec and Canada, could modern Montreal look very similar to Brussels? It would remain dominantly English, and presumably still the financial capital of Canada as a whole

Phlegmish posted:

Snow France vs. Tropical France

Always fun when American tourists come to Montreal (or worse, Quebec City) expecting it to be a snowy version of New Orleans, and are shocked and possibly disgusted when it's an actual functionally french city instead of just a place with French street names.

Kreez fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jun 16, 2020

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo

Phlegmish posted:

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, how is it all that different? It seems fairly comparable, just switch English and French with French and Dutch, respectively. If anything, French in Brussels is much more dominant than English appears to be in Montreal.

My point is that despite french being the dominant language in Montréal not anywhere english doesn't work, whereas you describe Brussels as being a place where it's a crapshoot if you can speak dutch or not.

e: New Orleans is also a great city everyone should visit but not move to, albeit for very different reasons.

Probably a strong contender for most unique city in the US though

Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jun 16, 2020

BonHair
Apr 28, 2007

English is weird as a non-dominant language in most places, because globalization means everyone (but not necessarily their mother) speaks it well enough. Here in Denmark, you can get by fine without speaking Danish and relying on English, and there is no meaningful Anglo minority to justify that, just globalization. It may be that English in Montréal is similar for most francophones, except with an actual Anglo minority to prop it up a bit.

Side note: the reason an accent sounds awful to your ears is that you ascribe negative social value to the accent. In essence, it's internalised bigotry.

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day
Then I must be a super bigot because I have a real hard time parsing thick accents.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Native speakers have a much harder time understanding other native speakers with accents they're not familiar with, than non-native speakers do. No idea why.

Also I don't know if it's also true for non-native speakers with accents. My guess would be: no.

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
I used to hate canadian french but now I loving love it

SimonSays
Aug 4, 2006

Simon is the monkey's name

BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:

Weren't they having problems with French people moving there because its "Cheap" and the French can't concieve of a France with multiple cities. I remember reading several articles about Montrealites complaining about French international-Gentrification.

It's a thing and it's loving weird to walk through neighbourhoods emblematic of Québécois city life and hear nothing but Anglos and Parisians.

However, their kids are all as Québécois as anyone else's so it'll work itself out in a generation, it's not like this is the first wave of European immigration to Montreal.

Kreez
Oct 18, 2003

BonHair posted:

It may be that English in Montréal is similar for most francophones, except with an actual Anglo minority to prop it up a bit.

This is definitely the case. I always take the hysterical "english is on the rise statistically in borough X" news items with a massive grain of salt. There's a huge difference between counting someone like my anglophone grandmother (who married a francophone but insisted on raising my dad and siblings in English for economic bigoted reasons, and lived in Montreal her entire life and probably has spoken more Mongolian than French in her life) counting as an anglophone speaker in statistics, and a recently arrived family of IT professionals from Mexico who are currently using English day to day in town (as there's zero Spanish in public life outside of ex-pat establishments) but spending 10 hours a week in French lessons and will be fluent in no time, and have put their (again, currently English speaking day to day at daycare) kids in a francophone school.

Kreez fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jun 16, 2020

Kreez
Oct 18, 2003

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Native speakers have a much harder time understanding other native speakers with accents they're not familiar with, than non-native speakers do. No idea why.

Also I don't know if it's also true for non-native speakers with accents. My guess would be: no.

My french is not native, and I find Parisian/French French accents exhausting to keep up with in movies or TV or whatever. Subtitles are definitely preferred if it's anything meaty.

It is quite strong though, (and would probably get back to approaching native if I moved back to Quebec and used it every day for a few months) so maybe you just have to hit a certain level after which accents become more of an issue than just understanding the language in the first place.

SimonSays
Aug 4, 2006

Simon is the monkey's name

Kreez posted:

My french is not native, and I find Parisian/French French accents exhausting to keep up with in movies or TV or whatever. Subtitles are definitely preferred if it's anything meaty.

It is quite strong though, (and would probably get back to approaching native if I moved back to Quebec and used it every day for a few months) so maybe you just have to hit a certain level after which accents become more of an issue than just understanding the language in the first place.

No it's not just you, Parisian French is horrible

Unkempt
May 24, 2003

...perfect spiral, scientists are still figuring it out...

BonHair posted:



Side note: the reason an accent sounds awful to your ears is that you ascribe negative social value to the accent. In essence, it's internalised bigotry.

Boy I am just mad racist against people from Birmingham (UK).

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Native speakers have a much harder time understanding other native speakers with accents they're not familiar with, than non-native speakers do. No idea why.

Also I don't know if it's also true for non-native speakers with accents. My guess would be: no.

As a native Spanish speaker, I can understand almost all international variants of the language just fine and even a little Italian and Portuguese, but give me thick ESL accents or Irish or Scottish or that addle-brained words slurry they call "the Deep South drawl" and I'm just going to draw blanks.

TinTower
Apr 21, 2010

You don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero.

Unkempt posted:

Boy I am just mad racist against people from Birmingham (UK).

I mean, is it really bigotry if Birmingham actually is a poo poo-hole?

Most major cities in the UK have at least two good football teams. Even Leeds has a decent side. Birmingham has two major teams and they're both utter dogshit.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Some non-native speakers put enough effort into their accents to sound better than a lot of native speakers.

Although I think what's often the best are the second-generation immigrants who consciously distance themselves from their parents' non-native accents by constructing for themselves what their preferred accent is. And if they don't try to ditch their parents' accents, they can get a brilliant melange of an affectation like what Christopher Walken has.

Count Roland
Oct 6, 2013

BonHair posted:

English is weird as a non-dominant language in most places, because globalization means everyone (but not necessarily their mother) speaks it well enough. Here in Denmark, you can get by fine without speaking Danish and relying on English, and there is no meaningful Anglo minority to justify that, just globalization. It may be that English in Montréal is similar for most francophones, except with an actual Anglo minority to prop it up a bit.

Side note: the reason an accent sounds awful to your ears is that you ascribe negative social value to the accent. In essence, it's internalised bigotry.

I'd say its propped up quite a bit. Along with natives Montreal is a university town, with McGill in particular attracting students from all around. There's also a non-trivial amount of immigration to Montreal from anglo Canada, and more again from foreign countries.

And the reason rural quebec french sounds ugly to me is I learned french from anglophones, with the curriculum based on "proper" french (whatever that is) which seems to be closer to the stuff you find in Paris, especially when it comes to pronunciation. Go to any rural area and you'll get strange accents, strange slang and generally less technically-proper forms of speaking. Quebec is no different, and boy it can be tough to parse sometimes.

Though I'll agree the swearing in Quebec is far superior.

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
In addition to second language education in all anglo countries being poo poo, there should really be more pressure in Canada to teach canadian french instead of standard parisian which is yes absolutely what you got taught if you went to public school in Canada. Hell, it seems like it's what's taught even in francophone schools west of QC unless they're in Ottawa or somewhere like that.

Phlegmish
Jul 2, 2011



Kreez posted:

How out to lunch is the following thought experiment: In an alternative timeline where Brussels is the main economic capital of Belgium but part of Flanders politically (like Montreal was in Quebec and Canada until the 70s). Flemish nationalists come to power in Flanders and impose Dutch language protection laws in Brussels. 50 years later, most of the wealthy and powerful French have long left for Liege (or wherever), elevating that city to the dominant economic capital of Belgium. Brussels is mainly Dutch speaking, with a handful of bland French enclaves full of stubborn old middle class people. Most of the French speaking going on in the city centre is for the benefit of French speaking tourists (I guess in this alternative timeline French is the worldwide lingua Franca?) and due to recent influx of young people from France and Wallonia pushed out of the ever more expensive Paris and Liege and moving into the high quality housing stock in old neighbourhoods left behind by fleeing French 40-50 years ago. Their French speaking is somewhat balanced out by the native Dutch speakers and by recent heavy immigration from Dutch speakers fleeing unemployment and high costs in the Netherlands.

This is broadly analogous to Montreal, right? It's out to lunch in the sense that the basic premise runs counter to Belgium's entire raison d'être (French intended). You have to make too many unrealistic assumptions. Belgium was, in the spirit of the time, explicitly intended to be a bourgeois, centralized, French supremacist state, based in Brussels. That ruling class never would have accepted either a Brussels in which Dutch is dominant, or being forced to move to Wallonia. Even though they have always despised the language of the Flemish peasants, they also had contempt for Walloons, which they would never identify as (including many of the ones whose families actually are originally from Wallonia) and which the Brussels elite has historically always treated in a semi-colonial fashion. They have traditionally had a very strange love-hate relationship with Flanders and its history and culture, in their view Flanders was stolen from them when Dutch became ascendant across the board. Any scenario in which these things you give as examples happen is also a scenario in which Belgium dissolves, since there's no longer anything holding it together.

That said, it is possible to imagine outcomes that are somewhat different. Maybe if the Flemish nationalist movement hadn't burned itself in both World Wars (especially II), and they had succeeded sooner and more broadly in awakening a sort of Flemish awareness and identity, the tide of Frenchification could have been turned and Brussels would be more like Montreal with its mix of languages today.

Conversely, it's not very difficult either to imagine a situation in which the 'bilingual' (read: francophone) area of Belgium is significantly larger than just the current Brussels Region. That's based on successive constitutional reforms, which could have gone differently, especially if the Flemish economy hadn't taken off the way it did.
I do not think it was ever a possibility for the entirety of Flanders to be Frenchified, however. Francophones were just too small a minority, and there was some reluctance to insist since (paradoxically) if Frenchification were too successful, French would lose its status as a signifier of social class - which is exactly what's happened in Brussels, for that and other reasons.

quote:

Or, opposite of that, if the 1980 "sovereignty-association" referendum had succeeded, yet Montreal had also somehow succeeded in seceding from Quebec itself as part of the negotiations between Quebec and Canada, could modern Montreal look very similar to Brussels? It would remain dominantly English, and presumably still the financial capital of Canada as a whole

Yes, I do think that that's a realistic scenario if you accept those two starting points. No matter what people say, borders are psychologically important, even internal ones as long as these correspond to actual administrative or other differences. In such a situation, francophones would very likely be unable to resist the sociological pressure from the dominant language that is English. Montreal would very likely end up as Brussels, except that the francophones would have less leverage still, being in a different state and not being an exclave.

BonHair posted:

Side note: the reason an accent sounds awful to your ears is that you ascribe negative social value to the accent. In essence, it's internalised bigotry.

That's part of it, but it doesn't explain everything. There's also familiarity and conditioning. You will rate a language variety higher if you've grown up listening to it, for example. Anything that deviates from it will sound 'wrong' to you in comparison.
Where I used to work, there were francophones who had varying skill in Dutch, but pretty much all of them dreaded having to call a Dutch (from the Netherlands) client. You would perhaps expect the opposite, given that they're culturally conditioned to look down on 'Flemish' and that the vernacular in Flanders generally deviates more from the standard language than it does in the Netherlands. But no, they much preferred a local accent since they had an easier time understanding it, and the local would probably have an easier time understanding them.

Either way, you are definitely right to minimize the importance of the supposed inherent aesthetic qualities of a language, I think that's a minor part of it. For example, I often hear that German is an 'ugly language'. Why? It's not actually particularly harsh, when they say that about Dutch or the Scandinavian languages I can understand, but German has fairly consistently vowel and consonant-shifted to become 'softer' in terms of pronunciation.
So what is the actual reason? I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's because they are making a mental association between the German language and the stereotype of the efficient, humorless German (or maybe a goose-stepping Nazi at worst). Of course German sounds ugly if you bark it. That goes for any language. But it's not an inherent quality of German that it has to be angrily barked.

Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jun 17, 2020

Milo and POTUS
Sep 3, 2017

I will not shut up about the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I talk about them all the time and work them into every conversation I have. I built a shrine in my room for the yellow one who died because sadly no one noticed because she died around 9/11. Wanna see it?
Twain wrote about how German was an effete, flowery language iirr

Soviet Commubot
Oct 22, 2008


Edgar Allen Ho posted:

In addition to second language education in all anglo countries being poo poo, there should really be more pressure in Canada to teach canadian french instead of standard parisian which is yes absolutely what you got taught if you went to public school in Canada. Hell, it seems like it's what's taught even in francophone schools west of QC unless they're in Ottawa or somewhere like that.

I've always found that really bizarre. I had a French professor in college who spent her middle and high school years in a French immersion school in Alberta and she sounded like a character out of Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. I also had a professor who was from Massachusetts and a native speaker of New England French and that was rad as gently caress. His whole family moved to Québec and he ended up retiring there as well.

Whorelord
May 1, 2013

Jump into the well...

TinTower posted:

I mean, is it really bigotry if Birmingham actually is a poo poo-hole?

Most major cities in the UK have at least two good football teams. Even Leeds has a decent side. Birmingham has two major teams and they're both utter dogshit.

Leeds are poo poo.

Tree Goat
May 24, 2009

argania spinosa

Whorelord posted:

Leeds are poo poo.

"The Leeds are poo poo? The loving Leeds are poo poo? You're poo poo. I've been in this business for 15 years. My name? gently caress you, that's my name."

Tree Goat
May 24, 2009

argania spinosa
Oh it's "weak." Ah well.

Vivian Darkbloom
Jul 14, 2004


https://twitter.com/nealnifty/status/1273003215903059969

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Tree Goat
May 24, 2009

argania spinosa

coward didn't even add mongolia and the rest of the roc claims. but then why add korea?

also this map was getting posted in response to this dude:

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