Originally Posted by jadis

Yeah it's very rarely singled out for its beauty and the peasant bit is not wrong... Though the irony is that its sounds are actually closer to French as it was spoken in certain regions of France in the 17th century compared to the Parisian French of today, which is the more recent evolution. Colonies are always more linguistically conservative than the metropolis, so if you want to hear some of the vowels that were part of various regional dialects in earlier French and have since disappeared in standard French, Canada is where you want to go (certain parts of New Brunswick too: Acadian French has some things in common with the French of Rabelais).

The vocabulary is of course way Americanized (despite inordinate pride in not saying le parking and le weekend like the French do) and you have varieties of both Quebecois and Acadian French that have been derided as bastardizations by speakers of both dialects.