On entend rien et on parle de maringouins

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A2 French listening practice · Québec French · Curated for beginners

💡 Did you know?

What does “maringouin” mean in Quebec French?

un maringouin
Québec French word with an Amazonian past
a mosquito — the Quebec word, borrowed from Tupi-Guarani

In Quebec a mosquito is un maringouin, not un moustique. The word is a long-haul traveller: French borrowed it in the sixteenth century from Tupi-Guarani, the language family of coastal Brazil, and it spread with French speakers across the Atlantic world. Same insect, an entirely different route into the language — and maringouin is what you will actually hear at a Quebec campsite.

It is attested in French from about 1566 and is still alive in Louisiana, the Antilles, Manitoba and parts of Normandy as well as Quebec. Moustique is understood everywhere in Quebec but sounds bookish beside it. This whole scrap of shouted-over-the-noise banter hangs on the word — t’as un maringouin — which is about as Québécois as a sentence gets.

Vocabulary frequency

How common is the vocabulary in this A2 French listening practice listening practice?

92.6%
of words are in the top 2,000 most common French words
Based on this reel’s transcript, most of the vocabulary is high-frequency, everyday French.

General French frequency

92.6%
Top 1,000
92.6%
Top 2,000
92.6%
Top 5,000

Spoken French frequency

92%
Top 1,000
100%
Top 2,000
100%
Top 5,000
👄 Conversational vocabulary
This reel’s words appear more often in subtitle-based spoken-French data than in general usage, so it may feel closer to everyday conversation.

Words above this video’s level

Quick glosses for vocabulary that goes beyond this video’s A2 level.

maringouin
2×
Rare / outside top 5,000
mosquito (informal)
yep
2×
Rare / outside top 5,000
yeah (informal)

Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · Lexique 3.83 (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.

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