Habiter or demurer

Where does he live?
He lives in Canada.

Il habite en le Canada.
He lives in Canada.
We use the French verb 'habiter' in this context.

We don't say, for example, he dwells in Canada. We use the verb live in this context.

Now I found out even the French word 'demurer' could be used.
Is it correct? I would like to know more about how to use the French verb demurer.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on June 28, 2009 at 12:46am

Incidentally, beware of using words like "correct" and "incorrect" (in French or English!)-- it can be a bit ambiguous what you mean. Sometimes people use "incorrect" to mean "ungrammatical" (i.e. a native speaker would generally not judge the sentence to be a possible, well-formed sentence of French). And sometimes people use it to mean "not conforming to some prescriptive etiquette".

A form such as "Tu fais quoi là?" belongs to normal, everyday speech. But so what? Why should normal, everyday speech be the stigmatised form? If what you're trying to describe is everyday French, then an utterance such as this is a perfectly grammatical utterance of French. From that point of view it's "correct". Similarly, you might label the questions "Pourquoi que les fous c'est nous?", "Quelle heure qu'il est?" as being 'slang', 'popular', 'non-standard' etc. But if you imagine a certain number of native French speakers using them, there's a point of view according to which they're still "correct".

But on the other hand, it is of course worth pointing out when forms are considered everyday, informal, formal, literary, slang, stigmatised etc. But I think these more detailed labels are more useful than "incorrect" vs "correct".

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Permalink Reply by Maxim Adams on October 14, 2009 at 7:38am

"Habiter" is a bit strange for English-speakers because we always say "live in". However, in most cases, "habiter" is equivalent to "inhabit". The exception is with cities and countries. So, for example: J'habite un apartement, J'habite rue Rivoli, but j'habite en Australie.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 14, 2009 at 3:56pm

N.B. In most cases, you can use habiter with the preposition. So e.g. you can say J'habite dans un appartemente; you can say either J'habite Paris or J'habite à/sur Paris. There's arguably a slight difference in emphasis if you leave out the preposition (a bit like you're saying "I am part of Paris/this appartment"), though it's not clear that all speakers/writers really make this distinction.

In terms of construction, habiter is similar to English inhabit, but with the caveat that inhabit is quite a rare word in English.