Elise Gallerno
Third Year
Double Major French and Business

By Megan Wadas

You mentioned that you're Canadian-American. When did you move to the US and from where?

So I was actually born and raised in the U.S, near the Canadian border. My dad wanted to live close to his home (Canada), but my mom didn't want to leave the U.S. I did spend a lot of time during my childhood and teenage years in Canada, including every summer and holiday season in different parts of Canada, ranging from Windsor to Quebec. Since my father emigrated from Canada and his entire family is Quebecois, I hold dual citizenship.

Did you grow up speaking French with your dad?

Yeah, it was pretty funny actually. As a little kid, my dad didn't have time to completely teach me the language, so I could only speak French in simple words and phrases and sometimes I didn't know they were French. He would say something to me, but not tell me it was French, so I would use it as though it were English. My brothers did the same thing when they were little.

For example, when I was eight years old, I was watching TV at a friend’s house, and I asked her, "Could you please hand me the pittoneuse?" She then proceeded to look at me as though I had grown a tail. She asked me what in the world I meant, and I repeated, "Pittoneuse? You know, the pittoneuse? To change the channel?" She then asked, "Do you mean the remote?", to which I promptly responded, "What in the world is a "remote"?" I later learned that "pittoneuse" isn't even a real a French word. It is a colloquial word in Quebec (and a very old one at that) that can be translated as "watcha-ma-call-it".

Tell me all about your experience in France. How different was the French there from Canadian French?

So I spent about 10 days in France in 2014 with my French class at the time. I spoke fairly well at the time, and had always been revered by my family as having such a good French accent that they couldn't even tell I was raised in America. So in France, I immediately took the chance to speak to as many locals as possible. However, the very first one said to me, "Oh, wow, I like your accent.” I was taken aback, but after a moment, I asked him, "What accent?" He laughed and said, "Oh, you are obviously Canadian." Well, I really couldn't argue with that.

Culturally, the French were much more proper. My normal Quebecois slang was almost completely inapplicable while in France. The transition from speaking proper Quebecois to speaking proper French was very difficult. And there is a proper way to speak Quebecois, for those out there who might think it is just a slang-ridden dialect of French. In my opinion, it is in fact more difficult than French itself. Unless you grow up in a Quebecois-speaking area, you have to be fluent in both English and French and be able to use the two simultaneously in order to speak and understand Quebecois (though they do still write in proper French). 

Original story here