Standard French is a Parisian project. It won, comprehensively, but it did not arrive in an empty country: it settled on top of other languages, and those languages are still audible in the places where they were strongest.
Three of those places are worth a learner's time, because each has a substrate underneath it and a vocabulary that comes with it.
Marseille and the Provençal underneath
The Midi spoke Provençal, a variety of Occitan, and that language shaped everything about how the south sounds.
The most audible effect is that Marseille pronounces syllables Paris swallows. Final e is sounded, so une is closer to unuh, and nasal vowels get a consonant after them: pain comes out closer to peng. The result is that southern French is markedly easier for learners to follow than Parisian, because more of the word survives.
dégun: nobody, no one. Straight from Provençal, with no French equivalent that carries the same force. Y a dégun is a complete sentence.
peuchère: an expression of sympathy or pity, roughly poor thing. Warm, slightly theatrical, and unmistakably southern.
fada: mad, crazy, in an affectionate sense. From the Provençal for fairy-touched.
cagole: a woman who is loud, over-made-up and unbothered about it. Originally pejorative and reclaimed with some enthusiasm in Marseille.
le cagnard: the blazing sun, the heat of it.
And putain as near-punctuation, which is covered with its geography in the French register article.
Lille and the Picard underneath
The far north spoke Picard, a langue d'oïl closely related to French but distinct from it, and its descendant is what everyone now calls ch'ti.
The word comes from the pronunciation itself: Picard turns the French ç and s sounds into ch, so c'est ti becomes ch'est ti, and soldiers from other regions in the First World War named the northerners after the noise.
biloute: mate, lad. The northern term of address, and the one that carried nationally.
une drache: heavy, sudden rain. Shared with Belgium, and needed constantly in both.
une wassingue: a floor cloth, a mop. The northern equivalent of the Hamburg Feudel from the northern German article, and equally baffling to everyone south of it.
braire: to cry, of a person. In standard French it is what a donkey does.
quoi qu'ch'est ?: what is it. The ch'ti question form, and the one the film made famous.
In 2008 Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis became one of the most-watched French films ever made and turned a regional stereotype into a national affection almost overnight. Northern French is now the one regional variety most French people can imitate, badly.
Belgium, and the numbers that finally work
septante: seventy. nonante: ninety.
France says soixante-dix, sixty-ten, and quatre-vingt-dix, four-twenties-ten. Belgium and Switzerland say septante and nonante, which are regular, transparent and older. The vigesimal counting that Paris uses is the innovation; the periphery kept the sensible system.
Switzerland goes further in some cantons with huitante for eighty, where both France and Belgium say quatre-vingts.
For a learner this is unambiguously good news. If you can go to Belgium or Switzerland, do your numbers there.
The rest of the Belgian vocabulary
un kot: a student room or flat. Universal in Belgian university towns and unknown in France.
une aubette: a bus shelter or news kiosk.
un pistolet: a round bread roll. In France it is a firearm, which produces a memorable first bakery visit.
dîner / souper: in Belgium, lunch and dinner respectively. France uses déjeuner and dîner, so the same word moves one meal along. Quebec and Switzerland do it the Belgian way too, which means France is the outlier here as well. This connects directly to the article on meal names.
s'il vous plaît: in Belgium, also used when handing something over, meaning here you are. Not a request, a presentation. This one confuses French visitors and not only foreigners.
un GSM: a mobile phone. France says un portable.
What this is actually worth
Two things.
The vocabulary is useful if you are going to any of these places, and one of them, Brussels, is where a very large number of internationally mobile people end up.
The larger point is that Parisian French is one variety among several rather than the language itself, and hearing that clearly makes you a better listener everywhere. A learner who has met septante and dégun stops treating everything unfamiliar as an error and starts treating it as information, which is the same shift that Andalusian forces on a Spanish learner.
How to learn it
Save the region with the word. Drache is northern and Belgian and nowhere else. The geography is half the entry.
Give Translate the whole phrase. Regional French carries its identity in constructions as much as in nouns.
Then let repetition do the thirty words. Regional vocabulary is dense where you are and absent elsewhere, which makes it fast to acquire and easy to keep.
The short version
Learn dégun and peuchère for the south, biloute and drache for the north, septante and nonante for Belgium.
And note that on numbers, meals and half a dozen other things, it is Paris that is unusual.
Heard French that Paris did not prepare you for? Put the line into Vokabulo with the region. Free to start on iPhone, iPad and in the browser. 🇫🇷
