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Giovanna-0273939
8 Feb 2020

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Question about France

Are there differences between accent in France? And what are the differences between France's and Switzerland's french?

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Michel_Maratrey
9 Feb 2020

  • Country or region France

France have a lot of different accent, The most popular are;
-The South accent, there is a lot of difference in this type, but in general this is a more singing speech.
-The North accent; (Ch’tis) which is prononced with « ch » for « j »
-In Alsace, you have a big German influence.
And I don’t really know for Switzerland...
I won’t offense somebody, this is all what I know, but I’m not an expert. (This is a dangerous subject)
But the better thing you can do is to search on internet, I’ m sure you have some videos with presentations of the accents and examples of the pronunciation !

WizzLight
9 Feb 2020

  • Country or region Belgium
I used to have a friend who was half Savoyard, half Swiss. He had a very pronounced accent. In fact, a French woman had come to talk to us and asked him which country (non-French speaking) he was from because she thought his accent had nothing to do with an usual accent. But not all Swiss people speak like that. As in Canada, Swiss Francophones are proud of their accent. In comparison, in Belgium, they try to lose it. These are two different mentalities. A survey was carried out in Switzerland, asking the inhabitants which Swiss accents they preferred. Everyone answered their own, quite naturally, because Switzerland is very mountainous, which means that each region is rather isolated and has many accents. On the other hand, when asked which accent they liked the least, almost everyone answered the Geneva accent, because it sounds too much like the standard French accent. One cliché that often comes up about the Swiss is that they are slow. This comes from the fact that they spend more time on their syllables than in the rest of the French-speaking world. The Swiss have a slightly slower rate of speech. For more information on pronunciation, please read this article : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_French What the article does not say is that they have sentence structures that could be considered erroneous elsewhere. For example, they like to put an "y" instead of the usual "le/la" or "en". "Manges-en" becomes "Manges-y". They pronounce certain words in a very typical way. For example, they drop the "d" at the end of "stand"... so it becomes "stan".

I used to have a friend who was half Savoyard, half Swiss. He had a very pronounced accent. In fact, a French woman had come to talk to us and asked him which country (non-French speaking) he was from because she thought his accent had nothing to do with an usual accent.

But not all Swiss people speak like that.

As in Canada, Swiss Francophones are proud of their accent. In comparison, in Belgium, they try to lose it. These are two different mentalities. A survey was carried out in Switzerland, asking the inhabitants which Swiss accents they preferred. Everyone answered their own, quite naturally, because Switzerland is very mountainous, which means that each region is rather isolated and has many accents.

On the other hand, when asked which accent they liked the least, almost everyone answered the Geneva accent, because it sounds too much like the standard French accent.

One cliché that often comes up about the Swiss is that they are slow. This comes from the fact that they spend more time on their syllables than in the rest of the French-speaking world. The Swiss have a slightly slower rate of speech.

For more information on pronunciation, please read this article :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_French

What the article does not say is that they have sentence structures that could be considered erroneous elsewhere. For example, they like to put an "y" instead of the usual "le/la" or "en".
"Manges-en" becomes "Manges-y".

They pronounce certain words in a very typical way. For example, they drop the "d" at the end of "stand"... so it becomes "stan".

Giovanna-0273939
9 Feb 2020

  • Country or region Brazil
@WizzLight Merci!
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