Additional context:
Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I’m in Europe, I’ve noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away…
In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just… understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it’s pretty incredible
Because Paris French has a group keeping it consistent, whereas Quebecois has no regulation and it’s just driven by vapid famewhores making idiot memes popular (just like English).
I worked with someone in Ottawa who was from France. She went to Gatineau (Quebec), and tried to order a cheeseburger. They could not communicate effectively in French and had to both switch to English. The struggle is not imagined.
Also, My high-school French was Quebecois, but my Uni-level French was Caribbean. I cannot speak Quebecois even more than I can barely speak French.
Quebecois is definitely difficult. I can understand people the next province over (New Brunswick) no problem as they tend to speak slower and many of their dialects like chiac have a lot of English words in them. But Quebecois tends to be spoken very quickly, and in some cases words run together much more. I’m a bilingual French Canadian and I have a lot of issues with that accent, which is strange as my family mostly came from Quebec originally. My grandfather, whose first language was French could watch tv from France and understand it perfectly, but had a lot of trouble with Radio-Canada reporters.