"Ton ancien famille d'accueil"

I was watching a (québecois) movie the other night wherein a foster mother, speaking to one of her charges, refers to "ton ancien famille d'accueil" (your former foster home). This drew my attention, as famille is, obviously, of feminine gender, so one would assume that it should be preceded by "ta ancienne," though "ton ancien famille" without any question rolls off the tongue with greater ease.

Were the scriptwriters simply throwing in a gramatically-incorrect phrase of the sort that you would in fact be likely to hear spoken in a lower-middle-class québecois environment? Would this phrase ever likely be spoken by a middle-class Parisian (or, more specifically, included in a film sequence featuring middle-class Parisians)?

Many thanks,

Sphere

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on May 22, 2013 at 9:59pm

It would have been ton ancienne famille d'accueil.

The form "ton" is always used, even in the feminine, before a vowel, but the adjective will still agree with the noun.

Even in very informal and/or uneducated speech, adjectives essentially always agree with their nouns. There's no class issue as such here.

(Exceptions: you will occasionally get speech errors or "hypercorrections" with certain 'irregular' adjectives in e.g. des institutions internationux where the form used in careful speech would be internationales.)

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Permalink Reply by Sphere on May 23, 2013 at 12:13am

Thanks for the clarification, Neil. Having grown up bilingual in Québec myself (but having had only sporadic opportunities to speak french since leaving there), I often find myself, wrt to the french language, like the centipede who can move along easily enough until you ask him how he knows which foot to put first.

"Ta ancienne famille" clearly sounded wrong to me, but I did not consciously remember the rule that "ton" is always used before a vowel, regardless of gender.

I would like to point out, though, that the actress did clearly say "ton ancien famille" in the film. I actually went back and listened a couple of times to be sure I was hearing it correctly (and it's even more obvious with québecois pronunciation, as the "en" of "ancien" is pronounced with a very sharp "é" -- like the english "eh" with a nasalized "n" following -- while the "en" in "ancienne" is pronounced with a flat "è" as in France).

So I think the scriptwriter (or maybe even the actress herself, spontaneously) threw it in that way because that's the kind of incorrect french that people in Québec who aren't particularly hung up on speaking "correct french" -- which may be a very large part of the population indeed! -- do actually speak. If she had said "ton ancienne famille," I suppose I would not even have stopped to think about it, since it would just have "felt" right. (FWIW, I watch a lot of French films, and almost no Québecois films, and this is the first time I've ever actually stopped and gone back to listen to something that sounded wrong to me again.)