Chiac (or Chiak, Chi’aq), is a patois of Acadian French spoken mostly in southeastern New Brunswick, Canada.[1] Chiac is often characterized and distinguished from other forms of Acadian French by its borrowings from English, and is thus often mistakenly considered a form of Franglais.
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (December 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the French article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 6,138 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Chiac]]; see its history for attribution.
You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Chiac}} to the talk page.
The word "Chiac" can also sometimes be used to describe an ethnic Acadian of rural southeastern New Brunswick, which are not considered French Canadian historically and ethnically, due to having their separate and distinctive history, they are considered ethnically as "Chiac-Acadian"[2] or simply "Chiac".
Characteristics
As a major modern day variety of the Acadian-French language, Chiac shares most phonological particularities of the dialect. However, Chiac contains far more English loanwords compared to other Canadian French dialects. Many of its words also have roots in the Eastern Algonquian languages, most notably Mi'kmaq. These loanwords generally follow French conjugation patterns; "Ej j'va aller watcher un movie" uses the English derived loanword "watch" as if it were an -er verb. The most common loans are basic lexical features (nouns, adjectives, verb stems), though there are a couple conjunctions and adverbs borrowed from English (but, so, anyway).
History
Chiac originated in the community of specific ethnic Acadians, known as "Chiacs, Chiaks or Chi'aq",[2] living on the southeast coast of New Brunswick, specifically near the Shediac Bay area.
While some believe that Chiac dates back as far as the 17th or 18th century, others believe it developed in the 20th century, in reaction to the dominance of English-language media in Canada, the lack of French-language primary and secondary education, the increased urbanization of Moncton, and contact with the dominant Anglophone community in the area. The origin of the word "Chiac" is not known; some speculate that it is an alteration of "Shediac" or "Es-ed-ei-ik".
Geographic distribution
Chiac is mostly spoken by native Acadian French speakers in the southeast region of New Brunswick. Its speakers are primarily located in the Westmorland County of southeastern New Brunswick. Further north along the coast, Acadian French resembling Québécois French is more common as one approaches the border with Quebec. To the immediate east, west and south, fully bilingual speakers of French and English are found, and beyond are typically unilingual Anglophones.
Dorion, Leah; Préfontaine, Darren R.; Barkwell, Lawrence J. (1999). "VI: Métis Culture and Language". Resources for Métis Researchers(PDF). Gabriel Dumont Institute and The Louis Riel Institute. p.14. Chiac, the little-known mixed Algonquian-Acadian French language of the Metis people in Maritime Canada bears a remarkable similarity in syntax to Michif
King, Ruth. "Overview and Evaluation of Acadie's joual," in Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities: Celebrating the Work of Gillian Sankoff edited by Miriam Meyerhoff and Naomi Nagy (2008) pp 137ff
Chiac: an example of dialect change and language transfer in Acadian French. National Library of Canada, 1987.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Chiac, and is written by contributors.
Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.