Excuse my French? The swear words that used to be illegal in Canada

Quebec has perfected such a vast variety of profanity that it's been called "the Amazon rainforest of swear words". But uttering these blasphemous terms could have once landed you in prison.

Thursday nights at Quebec City jazz joint Bar Sainte-Angèle are known for a buzzy open mic where veterans swap improvisational riffs with students from the nearby music conservatory. But as I elbowed towards the bar on a recent evening, I overheard a patron practicing a different local art with equal parts precision and heart. 

"Sacrement d'ostie de tabarnak", he said, cursing as his eyebrows climbed towards the bar's heavy-timbered ceiling. Taken literally, it translates to "sacrament of the communion host of the tabernacle". But the real meaning is anything but churchly.

Warning: Some readers may find language in this story offensive.

Speakers of Québécois French are known for using a unique class of blasphemous swear words derived from Catholic terms known as sacres ("sacred" profanities). Among the most famous are the seemingly innocent tabarnak ("tabernacle"), câlisse ("chalice") and Criss ("Christ"). But when angrily deployed, they carry all the offensive heft of English profanity.

Yelling "tabarnak!" is just as off-colour as the English F-word, while letting out a "câlisse!" is something closer to "damn". And they don't stop there.

When researching his 1980 book Le Guide Raisonné des Jurons (The Reasoned Guide to Swear Words), local folklorist Jean-Pierre Pichette recorded some 1,800 Québécois sacres. Some linguists now put the number at closer to 2,000. It's a lexicon of such variety, scope and colour that one expert compares the province's range of profanity to a biodiversity hotspot.

"It's like the Amazon rainforest of swear words," says Jean-François Joubert, an instructor at Quebec City's Cégep Garneau and author of Le Sacre du Québec (The Profanity of Quebec).

When I met Joubert for locally brewed beers in Quebec City's working-class Limoilou neighbourhood, he gestured over my shoulder at a patron sitting nearby. "Did you hear that?" he whispered. I didn't. "An excellent string of sacres", he said, with the smile of a lifelong connoisseur.

Some are biblical or liturgical deep cuts, such as simonaque (a reference to religious profiteering, and a slightly milder curse than tabarnak or câlisse) and ciboire (the sacred vessel used to hold the Eucharist, and another mid-tier swear).

Not all sacres are so arcane. Sainte vierge déculottée and sainte vierge en bicycle evoke the Virgin Mary appearing bare-bottomed, or on a bicycle, respectively. Asked about his personal favourites, Joubert offered the emphatically NSFW ostie consacrée au cul de cochon, or "consecrated communion host in a pig's ass".

Travellers to Quebec are likely to hear plenty of sacres in jazz bars, at hockey games and on street corners. Souvenir shops in Quebec City and Montreal sell shirts printed with phrases like "Je m'en câlisse, a vulgar way to say "I don’t care". At Musée POP in the city of Trois-Rivières, there are curses emblasoned on the wall of an ongoing exhibit exploring Québécois popular culture – a curatorial choice hinting that sacres go beyond the usual hammer-hits-thumb exclamations.

"They're so much a part of our life", says Michelle Bélanger, the museum's general director. "Sacres are a very important part of our history, culture, and identity."

What's more, understanding them sheds light on a side of Quebec that most visitors overlook entirely: a foul-mouthed legacy of cultural resistance.

It's hard to pinpoint the origin of sacres because, until relatively recently, even the most prolific cursers didn't write them down. Blasphemy was illegal in New France, the territory founded by the French in the 16th Century. In the early days, it was taken seriously. A first offence came with a hefty fine, writes Pichette; a third offence could put you in prison for a month.

That doesn't mean early French-speaking settlers held back. Joubert traces sacres to immigrants arriving from French cities like Rouen and La Rochelle that were historically Protestant but whose populations had undergone forced conversions to Catholicism.

"Even though on paper they're Catholic, they come from regions that had strife and religious conflict," he says. Joubert notes religious orders were a prominent part of life in New France, and thinks early settlers must have chafed at their presence. Blasphemy was a way to subvert the Church's power.

"If you look at the words, they're mainly about the Mass, like the classic ostie, câlisse and tabarnak," Joubert says. "They were taking some of the mystery, or mystique, away from the Mass."

Not all historians agree with Joubert's origin story. But there's a widespread consensus that Quebec's propensity for profanity was supercharged by a series of events in the 19th Century. 

In 1837 and 1838, British forces quelled two armed uprisings by largely secular, French-speaking nationalists. Following those rebellions, the Catholic Church stepped in, becoming the rigidly conservative administrators of everything from education to healthcare.

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"Starting in the 1840s, [Catholicism] became omnipresent in nearly every aspect of public life", says Québécois historian René Hardy, a professor emeritus at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Resistance to the change sparked an upwelling of profanity that Hardy has examined through the Church's own writings.

"When the bishops' council met in 1886, they concurred that using sacres had become the cardinal sin of all French Canadians," he says.

Then, in the 1960s, many Québécois rejected the Church's heavy-handed presence in a social upheaval that became known as the Quiet Revolution. The province rapidly secularised. At the same time, sacres became a way for Quebec's French speakers to bond, reaffirming a language and culture that could feel marginalised – both by a majority anglophone country and the broader francophone world, says Yulia Bosworth, an associate professor of linguistics at Binghamton University specialising in Quebec French. 

"The religious meaning is lost, but in the 1960s these terms acquired a countercultural significance that still remains," Bosworth says. "Today, sacres are probably the most emblematic and recognisable element of Quebec's linguistic identity." 

For linguists like Bosworth, it's not the religious source of Québécois sacres that's unusual. After all, most profanity worldwide falls into three broad categories: sexual terms, words related to bodily excretions and religious expressions. But the sheer scale of these "sacred" curse words stands out.

"With [roughly] 7,000 world languages, I'd put Quebec French in the top 25 – maybe top 10", in terms of the variety of curse words, Bosworth says. The words are also unusually adaptable, inviting innovation.

Many sacres can be variously used as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, an elasticity displayed in a famous cursing scene from the bilingual Canadian action-comedy Bon Cop, Bad Cop. "English is capable of this kind of creativity, with the F-word and others, but the degree to which Quebec French has taken it is absolutely remarkable," Bosworth says.

Sacres can also be linked together to form compound curses, which Montreal-based actor and YouTuber Nir Guzinski likens to assembling Ikea furniture. To illustrate the process, he offered the salty tirade "esti de câlisse de tabarnak de maudit de Criss" (literally: "communion host of chalice of tabernacle of cursed of Christ"). An online Québécois swear generator creates paragraph-long curses that are a modern blasphemer's masterclass.

Given the colourful vocabulary on hand, it's unsurprising that many French-language learners visiting or living in Quebec are eager to experiment with sacres.

"If you're interested in French-Canadian culture, you'll encounter them everywhere," says Frédéric Patenaude, a Montreal-based language teacher who hosts the Quebec French Podcast and is the author of Quebec French for Beginners. He teaches the sacres in class but advises caution when deploying them.

"It's subtle. Swear words are always tricky when you learn a second language because it's a question of the situation, the level of formality," he says, explaining that a common misconception is that sacres are "cute". "Yes, you can use them everywhere, but they do sound like swear words to us," he says.

For those dipping a toe in, he recommends trying out the milder versions that modify basic sacres – much as English-language speakers might say "darn" or "fudge" in place of spicier curses. Instead of saying "tabarnak", he says to opt for "tabarnouche", "tabarouette" or "tabarslack" – words that get the idea across with less risk of causing offence.

"If you're a tourist and start saying 'tabarnak' to everyone, this will not work for you," agrees Joubert. But he is enthusiastic about the prospect of newcomers and visitors dabbling in some light blasphemy. He thinks that, like generations of Quebecois, they might even find a way to build social bonds through profanity.

"If you get the right person, it's a great way of actually participating," he says. "It's a great road into the culture."

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