In this article, I am going to present some cultural information about French Canada, specifically vocabulary specific to the region that I hope you will find interesting. There are many French words and phrases that have a Canadian flavor, so let’s start learning!
In Quebec, there is a word that people love so much that the English in Quebec have adopted it.
It’s… DEPANNEUR I’m serious! In Quebec, the English say they are going to the dep or the depanneur is pronounced (dep-ugh-ner) in English.
A depanneur is an exact translation of the term convenience store in English… You know, the place where you buy some of this and some of that. Kind of an emergency backup when you can’t or feel too lazy to drive to Walmart to do all your discount shopping!
In a depanneur, you will find some cochonneries, which means junk food and also stupid/nonsense stuff (betises in standard French).
It comes from the English word pig – pretty clever, right?
Let me give you some examples:
Stop doing stupid things!
Stop-doing-some-things! <-- GLOSS means a fancy linguistic term for a literal translation
“Stop pacing!”
Eating junk is bad for your health.
Eat – something – suckling pig – damage-to-health
“Eating junk food is bad for your health.”
What’s also interesting is that when you look closely at the verb depanner, which means to help/get someone out of trouble, you can see that it looks a lot like the word depanneur. This is because verbs and nouns in French, just like in English, tend to share a common root, in this case, problem solving. You can probably see now how the meaning of these two words are related and where Quebecers (Quebecois) get their word for convenience store. That’s right, you go there when you’re in a bind and need to be bailed out.
Quite often, there will be a more international variety of a region-specific word, and this is what we generally call Standard French. The standard French equivalents for depanneur are superette and chez l’arabe (which literally means the place of the Arabic, which I suppose is a bit racist but isn’t considered that anymore. In French history, it was usually the Arabs who They acted as merchants for les pigneries, but these days it’s just a colloquial term.