INTRODUCTION

The first French-speaking colony in North America was established by Champlain in 1604 at Port-Royal (present-day Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia) on the Bay of Fundy, which came to be called ‘l'Acadie’ (Acadia). Four years later, Champlain founded a colony at Quebec, on the St Lawrence River, which was to become the centre of New France. These two establishments were to have separate and independent development and were to give rise to the two principal French dialect areas in Canada: Acadian French (AF) and Quebec French (QF). From the very beginning, AF and QF were relatively distinct since the great majority of the early settlers in Acadia came from the Poitou, Aunis and Saintonge area of western France and were mainly agricultural workers; the Laurentian colonists (Trois-Rivières was founded in 1634 and Montreal in 1642) came from a great number of areas of central, western and northern France, but particularly from Normandy (some 19 per cent), Île-de-France (18 per cent) as well as from Poitou-Aunis (22 per cent); settlers from the latter did not arrive until after 1640 (Charbonneau and Guillemette, 1994).

In this brief chapter, my purpose is not to review the history of the French-speaking populations of Canada but rather to describe some of the linguistic features that characterize Canadian French (CF) varieties.