OffQc | Québécois French Guide

Oh all right, I’m not that cruel… 🙂

Here are the answers to the Québécois French and Montréal quiz from #982, with a short explanation as to why each answer is the correct one.

If you click on the thumbnail, you’ll get the full size.

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In the 1000 Québécois French guide, there’s an example sentence (#49) that reads:

Y va capoter si j’y dis ça!
He’s gonna lose it if I tell him that!

Let’s look at the two uses of y in that example, which mean different things.

If we cancel out the informal spellings in the example, we get:

Il va capoter si je lui dis ça!

In conversational language, both il and lui (when used in the sense of à lui or à elle) can contract. Il can contract to i’, and lui to ‘i. So, they both sound like i in their contracted forms. When these informal features show up in writing, they’re usually written as y.

Knowing this, can you say how the following might be pronounced informally in a conversation?

je lui donne
je lui ai donné
je lui ai dit
je lui ai demandé

Lui can contract after other subjects, but let’s leave that for another post.

Remember, lui can only contract like this in informal language when it means à lui, à elle. In pour lui, avec lui, à côté de lui, etc., lui is still pronounced as… lui.

Answers

j’y donne
j’y ai donné
j’y ai dit
j’y ai demandé