I've recently had an epiphany to the fact that cranberries are native to North America. I probably already knew this, but it's striking me lately because of a commercial that is airing here a lot at the moment and because my French housemate has been buying Ocean Spray cranberry juice lately and remarking at its goodness as though it is a newly discovered thing. The bottles here are a lot smaller than in Canada and kind of expensive and the first thing I noticed was the label "Cranberry" since in Canada, our bilingual label says "Canneberge". I questioned my housemate and then my French dictionary about it and neither knew of this "canneberge" word so I made the exciting discovery that it is a Canadian word. (Seriously, I really do dig language things like this. And the origins of plants and such--kinda neat, I think.) So yeah, France says "cranberry" with a French accent.
One day I decided to find this Ocean Spray commercial online so that I could post it and that's when I found a lot of other Ocean Spray commercials...some of you may know those Straight from the Bog commercials in English with the two cranberry farmer guys standing in the bog with the cranberries...well apparently they exist in England and Australia too. In all of them, the two guys have a kind of North American farmer accent. Funnily, the French one has two guys who are meant to be from Québec, so their accents definitely stand out on tv here. I've assumed that they're not really from Québec and that they are some French actors imitating Québecois and in my YouTube search, I found that Quebec has its own version of the commercial in which they actually ARE Québec guys, with farmer accents (I'm assuming). Here they are...whether you speak French or not, you should be able to hear the difference between the two. Also, you may be able to pick out the two different ways that they
pronounce "Ocean Spray"--the France one says, "Océ-an Spray" while the
Québec one says it in English. The French imitation of the Québec accent commercial is actually a little easier for me to understand than the actual Québec one.
#1 Québec
#2 France
And just for fun, here's another French commercial that's on right now that's kind of fun (and there's no talking, so you'll get it)!
2 comments:
interesting, I can totally hear the different accents. But I can't really explain the difference....sort of like accents from NZ vs OZ. I can hear it, but I can't articulate what the sound difference is.
Funny that the other country's commercials (watched the Australian one too) don't talk about no added sugar. Guess that is not a selling feature outside of North America!
I'm wondering if it's because the other features of the cranberry (UTI treatment, high antioxidant, etc.) are already well-known to North Americans...The non-North American commercials are more describing the fruit than the Ocean Spray brand. (There are a lot of North American commercials for Ocean Spray that promote all the flavours and stuff as well as the low sugar.)
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