[Verse 1] Radio-Canada anchor, crisp and clean, you caught every syllable Now Monsieur Gagnard from Chicoutimi's got speech that's visceral Eighty-three years old, dentures loose, apical r still rolling Diphthongs splitting open — père, mère, fête — your brain is folding Affrication hitting — tu, dire, petit — those t's and d's are buzzing Lax high vowels in vite and route, your ears start second-guessing Nasals shifting register, the vowels aren't where you mapped them Saguenay, Beauce, Gaspésie — six regions, go and track them [Chorus] Chu tanné, ché pas, y'a rien kessé A dit que, s'a table, pis là on est Vous dormez-tu bien? C'est quoi que ça veut dire? Où c'est que vous mal? Ça fait que — you gotta rewire Chu tanné, ché pas, y'a rien kessé Forty graded extracts, dictation every day Salle d'attente buzzing, reconstruct what each one said Seventy-five percent or you don't proceed ahead [Verse 2] Je suis becomes chu, il devient y in a heartbeat Sur la collapses down to s'a, the syllables delete Qu'est-ce que compresses to kessé, elle evaporates to a A dit qu'a voulait partir — that's four words stripped away Côte-Nord fisherman, Abitibi miner, Outaouais Franco border Acadian chiac bleeding through, Franco-Ontarian disorder Every regional pocket bent the vowels a different angle Parkinson's tremor, stroke-flattened pitch — the signal starts to tangle [Chorus] Chu tanné, ché pas, y'a rien kessé A dit que, s'a table, pis là on est Vous dormez-tu bien? C'est quoi que ça veut dire? Où c'est que vous mal? Ça fait que — you gotta rewire Chu tanné, ché pas, y'a rien kessé Forty graded extracts, dictation every day Salle d'attente buzzing, reconstruct what each one said Seventy-five percent or you don't proceed ahead [Bridge] Missing teeth compress the fricatives, hearing loss means they project flat Dentures blur the labials — your phoneme map? Scrap that Shadow the audio, mouth moving, five minutes daily drilling Unscripted rural interviews — that's where comprehension's ceiling Interrogative tu tags a question onto any verb form Vous dormez-tu? Vous mangez-tu? Old grammar, new norm Ça fait que stitches clauses, pis chains every thought together Beauce grandmother mid-sentence — parse it, store it, whether or never [Verse 3] Thirty items, mixed-speaker test — anchors, elders, six accents Apical r from Gaspésie grandfathers carries consequence Nasal shift from standard French means bon sounds almost wrong Train your cochlea on the gloss, the transcript, then the song Elision swallows syllables the way Québec swallows winter J'sais pas to ché pas — five phonemes splintered to a splinter Salle d'attente simulation: three patients overlapping, tangled Module two's ten hours — forty extracts left you angled
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