Getting Quebec French Instead of France French From AI

The stereotype is that Quebec French is full of English. In formal written French it is the reverse: Quebec has an official terminology authority that coins French replacements, and words that France uses in English are the ones a Quebec reader will flag.

The anglicism inversion

France French freely borrows English in technology and business: email, shopping, parking, week-end, chat, spam. Quebec French, operating in a French-speaking minority within an English-speaking continent, has treated loanword replacement as a live language-policy question for fifty years, and has an institution doing the work: the Office québécois de la langue française, whose Vitrine linguistique publishes its terminology and usage guidance.

So a model that produces “Quebec French” by adding colloquialisms to France French has it backwards. Colloquial spoken Quebec French does contain distinctive anglicisms, but formal written Quebec French — which is what a product, a document or a support message is — is systematically more French than France French. That inversion is the single most useful thing to know here, and it is the thing a generic prompt gets wrong.

A model asked for “French” produces Metropolitan French, because France supplies most French-language text on the web. The corpus-share mechanism is the same one behind Portuguese defaulting to one variety, with the difference that here the non-default variety has a published standard you can name.

Terminology that differs

concept          Quebec (fr-CA)        France (fr-FR)
------------------------------------------------------------
email            courriel              e-mail / mail
online chat      clavardage            chat / tchat
spam             pourriel              spam
podcast          balado                podcast
shopping         magasinage            shopping
parking          stationnement          parking
weekend          fin de semaine        week-end
car (colloquial) char                  bagnole
convenience shop dépanneur             supérette / épicerie
ferry            traversier            ferry
stop sign        ARRÊT                 STOP
sweater          chandail              pull
lunch            dîner                 déjeuner
dinner           souper                dîner
breakfast        déjeuner              petit-déjeuner
to download      télécharger           télécharger
smartphone       téléphone intelligent smartphone

The meal names deserve attention because they are a shift rather than a substitution. Quebec uses déjeuner, dîner and souper for the three meals; France uses petit-déjeuner, déjeuner and dîner. The word dîner therefore means midday in Quebec and evening in France, which is not a stylistic difference but a scheduling bug waiting to happen in any application that mentions mealtimes.

Courriel is the flagship case and the one that most reliably signals the variety: it was an OQLF coinage, it is standard in Quebec government and business writing, and its presence or absence tells you at a glance which variety a French text is in.

Typography and formatting

These are small and highly visible, and no prompt will produce them unless asked.

• Spacing before high punctuation. France French puts a non-breaking space before ; : ! ? and inside guillemets. Quebec convention, as documented by the OQLF, keeps the space before the colon but generally omits it before the semicolon, exclamation mark and question mark. A page full of Bonjour ! is France French; Bonjour! is Quebec.
• Quotation marks. Both use guillemets « », but the internal spacing follows the rule above.
• Numbers. Both use a space as the thousands separator and a comma as the decimal mark, but Quebec permits the decimal point in some financial and technical contexts under North American influence. Related: currency is the Canadian dollar, written 12,50 $ with the symbol after the amount — the opposite of English Canadian usage, which is the sort of thing covered in currency symbol placement by locale.
• Dates. Canadian official usage favours YYYY-MM-DD in administrative contexts, which differs from France’s DD/MM/YYYY. If dates appear in your output, state the format rather than trusting the locale.

Register and inclusive forms

Quebec adopted feminised job titles earlier and more completely than France did. Professeure, auteure, écrivaine, ingénieure and docteure are ordinary standard usage in Quebec and were contested in France for much longer. Output aimed at Quebec that uses the masculine form for a named woman reads as dated at best.

This intersects with the broader question of grammatical gender in generated French — job titles for unknown referents, mixed groups, and the various inclusive-writing conventions — which has its own decisions to make and is the subject of gendered nouns in French output. Decide it separately from the variety question; the two are orthogonal.

On address, Quebec commercial writing uses vous broadly, much as France does, but Quebec is somewhat quicker to tu in consumer-facing contexts. As everywhere in this cluster, decide and state it rather than leaving it to the model.

The procedure

1. Ask by locale and by authority. “Write in Quebec French (fr-CA), following Office québécois de la langue française terminology.” Naming the OQLF is a stronger signal than the locale tag alone, because it is a specific institution with a specific published position and its name co-occurs with Quebec terminology throughout the training data.
2. State the anglicism rule explicitly, and in the right direction. “Prefer French terminology over English loanwords: courriel not email, clavardage not chat, pourriel not spam, stationnement not parking, fin de semaine not week-end.” Five pairs cover most of what a reader notices.
3. Specify the punctuation spacing. “Do not put a space before ! ? or ;. Keep the space before :.” This is one sentence and it is the difference between output that looks Quebec and output that looks French with Quebec words in it.
4. Handle meal and time vocabulary explicitly if your application touches schedules, using the Quebec sense of dîner and souper. This is the one item on the list that can cause a factual error rather than a stylistic one.
5. Give one paragraph of example text in Quebec French. As everywhere, an example in the target variety carries more than a description of it.
6. Verify mechanically. Grep for e-mail, email, week-end, parking, shopping, and for a space before ! or ?. All are unambiguous France markers, and all are cheap to check on every generation.

One caution about scope. Quebec French is not Canadian French in general — Acadian French in New Brunswick and the French of Ontario and Manitoba have their own usage, and fr-CA as a locale tag flattens all of them into one. If your audience is specifically Acadian, the terminology above is closer than Metropolitan French but is not correct, and the honest answer is that the written corpus for it is thin enough to put it in the territory of a variety a model barely knows.