endnote n.222: Marathe's Québecois French
N.b. again that Marathe’s native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic Parisio/European French but cont. id. Québecois French, which is about on a par with Basque in terms of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninflected grammatical features, an inbred and obstreperous dialect, and which in fact Steeply barely got an ‘Acceptable’ in, in U.S.O. technical-interview training in Vienna / Falls Church VA, and which does not admit of easy coeval expression in English.
Context
The whole of endnote 222, glossing "despite language" in the Marathe–Steeply liaison arrangement. The narrator writes an actual grammatical anatomy of Québecois French — inflected and uninflected features, Basque-grade difficulty, "an inbred and obstreperous dialect" that "does not admit of easy coeval expression in English" — which quietly explains the mangled, translated-sounding English Marathe speaks throughout the mountainside dialogues. Dialect described in a prescriptivist's vocabulary: inbred, obstreperous, graded.