Last time I heard people from Québec I was astonished by one of them speaking with such a strong accent that it seemed a foreigner language if I didn't make conscious effort to listen to her. I wonder when will the two variants will diverge enough to be considered different languages.
Do you have have a source for [1]? I want to know from were the commenters where from.
They aren't different languages, they are both French, just with different accents.
There are some expressions (locutions) that differ in France and in Québec, but I don't believe this makes the two mutually incomprehensible.
It's not as if France has one single pure accent that everyone can understand. How about the St Denis accent for example? To say nothing of all these accents.[0]
In addition, while I lived in Brussels, I did some volunteer work with the English-speaking theatrical groups (American Theater Company, English Comedy Club, and Irish Theatre Group), who had all gotten together and purchased an old beer factory for set production and rehearsal space, as well as a small stage location across the courtyard.
For one particular production, the volunteer lighting designer was also a professional lighting designer for Francophone theater, and was with the touring version of the French Language "Lion King" production. He explained to me that he was volunteering with our group because he wanted an opportunity to practice his English.
I got drafted in to be his assistant [0], and we talked a bit about what the world is like for professional theater company members in the French-language world.
One striking thing he told me was that there was a rule that regardless of how different places in the world might speak French on the street or elsewhere in their lives, when it came to how French was spoken on the stage, they insisted that it must be the official Parisian style as regulated by Le Académie française.
So, here was a Belgian, who spoke French in the Bruxellois style, but he was also able to speak it in the Parisian style, and he knew and understood the difference and why there was a difference. And he could explain it to me, a "dumb American in Brussels".
[0] Turned out that he was due to travel to Canada shortly for the opening of the "Lion King" there, and wouldn't be in town for the actual production. So, I got to learn how to operate a simple analog lighting board.
I lived in Brussels for almost eight years. I know that when I traveled to France on occasion, they would usually look at me like I was a total moron, and I never understood why.
I'm sure part of it was that I was a classic "dumb American" in Paris, but Belgian natives also explained to me that they speak French much more quickly down there, and anyone who speaks it more slowly (as is done in Brussels and virtually all other Francophone places in the world, including most of the rest of France), likewise get treated like they are morons.
So, the Belgians certainly noticed that French has changed over time and it has changed more quickly in Paris over the other parts of the world, and they were helpful enough to share this information with me.
I don't guarantee that it's talking about Canadian French specifically, but Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GUBIJ8/ ) has some discussion of the relationship between new world French and France French, including a contemporary source remarking on how "good" (= upper class Parisian) new world French was at the time.
First in 1759 the French lost the war against the English in North America.[0] Canada, then known as 'New France,' came under English rule, and all the French elites that had the means to leave went back to France.[1]
The connection to France was severed. Thirty years later in France society would be upended by the revolution.
Now in the 18th century Paris there were two 'usages' or accents in current use. The 'bel usage' and the 'grand usage.'
The 'bel usage' was spoken by the monarchy down to the common people. The 'grand usage' was used for public speeches and by priests and politicians etc.
The bel usage was more familiar, more a relaxed pronunciation, with many elisions («leux valets», «sus la table») while the 'grand usage' was more 'pointu', that is to say more precisely pronounced, picking out each syllable more individually, with fewer elision and dipthongs.
The linguist Jean-Denis Gendron, in his book 'D’où vient l’accent des Québécois? Et celui des Parisiens ?'[2][3] argues that after the third estate won the revolution, they purposefully adopted the 'grand usage,' perhaps as a means to distinguish themselves from the old order.
Ironically, people in Québec now speak a derivative of the 'bel usage', which has evolved over time, but more slowly because Québec culture was very conservative even up to the 1950s.
It is said that when the king famously said: 'la loi c'est moi', it probably came out like: 'la loé, c'est moé' sounding like a Québecois.
You've repeated the claim that Quebecois has changed "more slowly" or "less" than French has, but for all your historical discussion, you've provided absolutely no evidence or even a metric for similarity.
I do not believe any such evidence or metric exists. A language is a point in a space with many dimensions; while on any particular dimension it is easy to evaluate whether more or less change has occurred, this is not possible overall.
