"to mount" and "to dismount", as one does with a horse or a carriage), the Québécois variety in its informal register tends to use embarquer and débarquer, a result of Quebec's navigational heritage.
In the period between the Act of Union of 1840 and 1960, roughly 900,000 French Canadians left Canada to emigrate to the United States to seek employment.
As a result, Quebec French began to borrow from both Canadian and American English to fill accidental gaps in the lexical fields of government, law, manufacturing, business and trade.
The Office québécois de la langue française was established to play an essential role of support in language planning.
The difference in dialects and culture is large enough that speakers of Quebec French overwhelmingly prefer their own local television dramas or sitcoms to shows from Europe or the United States.
Conversely, certain singers from Quebec have become very famous even in France, notably Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Céline Dion, and Garou.
[11][12] Nevertheless, Metropolitan French series such as The Adventures of Tintin and Les Gens de Mogador are broadcast and known in Quebec.
[citation needed] Sociolinguistic studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s showed that Quebecers generally rated speakers of European French heard in recordings higher than speakers of Quebec French in many positive traits, including expected intelligence, education, ambition, friendliness and physical strength.
[16] The researchers were surprised by the greater friendliness rating for Europeans,[17] since one of the primary reasons usually advanced to explain the retention of low-status language varieties is social solidarity with members of one's linguistic group.
François Labelle cites the efforts at that time by the Office québécois de la langue française "to impose a French as standard as possible"[17] as one of the reasons for the negative view Quebecers had of their language variety.
Feminine forms in -eure as in ingénieure are still strongly criticized in France by institutions like the Académie française, but are commonly used in Canada and Switzerland.
One characteristic of major sociological importance distinguishing Quebec from European French is the relatively greater number of borrowings from English, especially in the informal spoken language, but that notion is often exaggerated.
[29] The Québécois have been found to show a stronger aversion to the use of anglicisms in formal contexts than do European francophones, largely because of what the influence of English on their language is held to reveal about the historically superior position of anglophones in Canadian society.
[29] According to Cajolet-Laganière and Martel,[30] out of 4,216 "criticized borrowings from English" in Quebec French that they were able to identify, some 93% have "extremely low frequency" and 60% are obsolete.
While words such as shopping, parking, escalator, ticket, email and week-end are commonly spoken in Europe, Quebec tends to favour French equivalents, namely: magasinage, stationnement, escalier roulant, billet, courriel and fin de semaine, respectively.
According to Chantal Bouchard, "While the language spoken in Quebec did indeed gradually accumulate borrowings from English [between 1850 and 1960], it did not change to such an extent as to justify the extraordinarily negative discourse about it between 1940 and 1960.
It is instead in the loss of social position suffered by a large proportion of Francophones since the end of the 19th century that one must seek the principal source of this degrading perception.
[34] It is thought that early French colonists adopted this word in the late 1600s after exchanges with explorers returning from South America.