In Montreal, we have BIXI bikes. These are rental bikes that anybody can use in exchange for payment. If you’ve been to Montreal, you’ve no doubt seen the rows of BIXI bikes in the streets during the summer months.
At one of the BIXI stations, there was an advertisement encouraging people to use the bikes. The advertisement showed an image of a BIXI bike with a simple caption: Embarque.
In French everywhere, we can use the verbs embarquer and débarquer to talk about getting on and off boats or even planes.
In Quebec, you’ll sometimes hear these two verbs used in even more circumstances, such as getting on or off a bus, the metro, or, like in the example above, a bike. Even in Quebec, this is an informal use; otherwise, monter and descendre would be used.
We could translate the example from the BIXI advertisement as “Hop on” in English.
More examples:
monter dans l’autobus (used everywhere in French, including Quebec)
embarquer dans l’autobus (used at an informal level in Quebec)
descendre du véhicule (used everywhere in French, including Quebec)
débarquer du véhicule (used at an informal level in Quebec)
You can always say monter and descendre yourself because they are used everywhere in the French-speaking world. But do, at the very least, learn to recognise these informal uses of embarquer and débarquer as used in Quebec.
