Montreal has got to be one of the only cities on Earth that has a select list of vocabulary only used in Montreal. This has occurred to me several times over the past few years but even more so the last week because of two discussions, one with a guy originally from Toronto but living in Singapore for many years and one with a journalist at The Gazette.
Words like depanneur which means convenience store. I often forget that outside Montreal depanneur doesn`t have any meaning and people give me strange looks. (In China a few years ago, I kept calling it "the dep.")
Allophone is a word people might know but it means something very specific in Montreal: someone whose first language isn't English or French. But in a city with so much linguistic diversity, we size people up by their language background (almost how in other cities, people are sized up by their jobs or the neighborhood in which they live). A girl I work with (an Anglophone though she speaks French almost perfectly and comes from a Spanish-speaking background) told me that when someone speaks English, she can tell from just a few sentences not only if they are a Montrealer or not but where they are from the city, which high-school they most likely went to. When one considers how few English high-schools there are left in Montreal, I guess that makes sense: they each develop their own mini-dialect.
Local communities even have their own dialects: there are specific words and turns of phrases that only Italian-Montrealers use and they are very easy to spot. It's not that they have an Italian accent but that they use certain cadences and intonation which is unique to that community.
Chinese and Indian Quebeckers (even 2nd or 3rd generation) almost always speak English better than French. And Vietnamese Quebeckers almost always speak French better than English.
Another girl from work asked me what stagiare was in English. The answer: stagiare. I guess the correct term is intern, but in Montreal, no one uses that word. We all say stagiare and for internship, we do "a stage." (French pronunciation).
Also, I always say "guichet" (for cash machine or ATM) and in the office, we talk only of "subvention" applications (grant applications).
And so often I catch myself when I say "open" my computer. I tell myself it's because it's a laptop and I actually do have to open it to turn it in but a few weeks ago, I told someone to "open" the lights. And it didn't really sound that weird. (In all honesty, though, we "open" the lights in most languages and English is weird in that we "turn" them on or off).
Oh, and another word: animator. When I first came to Montreal, I was given an interview for an animator's job and I was so confused. It had nothing to do with drawing cartoons. It's a very general word which can mean "host," "emcee," or "activities coordinator" or even very broadly "person in charge." The woman at the interview burst in laughter when I expressed some hesitation that I couldn't draw well so wasn't sure if "animator" was the right job for me...
Sometimes people tell me that I've lost my American accent. I don't think I have but I do notice how nasal and long vowels are whenever I am in the US. The pronunciation always strikes me as over the top. I don't have a Montreal accent but the longer I stay here the more I adopt Montrealisms....
