Windsor has a unique take on French street names. Here’s a look at why | CBC News

Peer-ee. Drew-lard. Oh-let.

When it comes to French street names, Windsorites have pronunciations all their own. Nothing quite demonstrates someone is truly local to Windsor like the way they refer to certain roadways.

But how did such a phenomenon develop?

“There are some kind of odd ones there,” admits Marcel Beneteau, an author and retired professor of French-Canadian folklore.

“Some can be fairly easily explained. Others kind of defy any logical explanation.”

For example, the way Windsorites pronounce Pierre Avenue — perhaps our most noticeably weird speaking quirk.

Anywhere else in the world, Beneteau says, the pronunciation would be obvious. But not in Windsor.

“I don’t know what the problem is. People can say Pierre Trudeau, people can say Pierre Poilievre. Why can’t they say Pierre Avenue?” Beneteau laments. “I can’t think of any historical or linguistic explanation for that.”

“It rhymes with Erie Street? I don’t know.”

Windsor-born resident Benjamin Daher says it’s amusing to him and his colleagues that GPS navigation voices and map apps can never vocalize the city’s routes the way that locals do.

“I do say ‘Peer-ee,’ because of my grandparents… Everyone in the area has always called it that,” Daher says. “It’s ‘Peer-ee.’ If you call it ‘Pea-air,’ everyone corrects you.”

Perhaps we should understand why Windsor has a lot of French street names in the first place.

Many of the roads that run north-south take their names from French families that originally settled the area more than 270 years ago.

The French regime at the time granted land parcels to families with surnames such as Ouellette, Pelissier and Lauzon.

Other street names can be traced to French settlers describing the region’s geography. For example, Grand Marais translates in French to “big marsh” — and the roadway runs alongside wetlands to this day.

Such nomenclature persisted despite the British conquest of the region in the 1760s.

But Beneteau says even his studies of so-called “Muskrat French” — the culture that arose among the isolated French-speaking populations around the Detroit River — don’t account for Windsor’s peculiar mutations.

“I think the main reason is just… people not knowing how French should be pronounced. So they pronounce it according to English pronunciation rules rather than French.”

The tendency for locals to say ‘Oo-let’ or ‘Oh-let’ for Ouellette Avenue is due to a kind of linguistic laziness, Beneteau suggests. Anglophones see the “Ou” and assume an English phoneme — or language sound — rather than a French “wuh” sound.

Similarly, Langlois Avenue lost its French “wah” sound because it looks like it should have an English “oy” sound — much like what happened to the name Illinois.

Some mispronunciations are quite understandable to Beneteau. The proper French way of saying Lauzon and Drouillard involve phonemes that aren’t common in English.

“They have what is known as a nasal vowel. Part of the sound is supposed to come out through your nose,” Beneteau says.

Indeed, the 18th century cartographer George Drouillard, who took part in the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, was persistently referred to as “Drewyer” in Lewis’s journals.

“There’s a precedent for that word being difficult for an English reader to pronounce. You can kind of understand why people make that mistake,” Beneteau said.

Other Windsor pronunciations, such as Grand Marais and Pelissier, are less forgivable — with locals adding an ‘s’ sound to one, but disregarding the ‘s’ sound of the other.

“Maybe some of your viewers will come up with an explanation, but I’ve never been able to find one,” Beneteau said.

“I do know how to properly say these,” said Melissa Medeiros, who grew up in Windsor before moving to England. She’s visiting the city to see family over the holidays.

Despite Medeiros knowing better now, she says Windsor pronunciations were what she was taught. “It’s funny when I bring my husband back here and he doesn’t understand why we pronounce things the way that we do.”

Stephanie Groves moved to Windsor from Chicago around 40 years ago. Over the decades, she has absorbed Windsor’s street name pronunciations — except ‘Peer-ee.’

“That one never seemed right to me, for some reason,” Groves says. “I don’t know. (Pea-air) is the way I think it should be.”

Complicating matters is the fact that traditional French pronunciations of some street names have survived in modern Windsor speech. Locals typically say Ypres Avenue, Pilette Road, Goyeau Street, and Marentette Avenue in a manner that approximates how they were originally said.

And some street names — like Parent Avenue and Baby Street — match English nouns so directly that Beneteau doesn’t fault anyone for not recognizing them as French family names. “If it’s an actual English word, I think that’s a bit picky,” he says.

“Yes, the family name is ‘pah-raunt,’ but anybody could look at that and say ‘pear-ent.'”

Beneteau invites anyone interested in Windsor’s French-Canadian heritage to delve into the many books on the subject. His own book, co-written with Peter Halford, is entitled Mots Choisis (Chosen Words) and examines 300 years of Francophone culture around Detroit and Lake Erie.

“The thing is, when you lose the pronunciation, you kind of lose a part of the history, too,” Beneteau says. “I’m sure a lot of people don’t realize to what extent Windsor was a French settlement… These names, it’s kind of a daily reminder of Windsor’s history.”

All that said, it could also be argued that Windsor’s way of saying certain street names isn’t actually incorrect… It’s just local.

Pronunciations changing over time is “a normal thing,” Beneteau says — especially when different cultures mesh together as they do in Canada.

“It works both ways,” Beneteau notes. “I remember when I was studying in Quebec City, I had to go visit someone and they told me their address was on ‘Magier.’ I had to look it up on a map. And found out it was actually Maguire.”

Some Anglicizations are so commonly said — such as Paris — that they’re never questioned.

No one would think saying Boblo Island is wrong, despite the island being once named Bois Blanc.

And did you know that the famous (but now-demolished) Abars Tavern was originally called Hebert’s Tavern?

The original owner had the French family name Hebert.