MARIE-PIERRE BELLEROSE!!!

Thanks for putting my video here, Dave!
I hope you all enjoyed it!

When you inject foreign words into any language it sounds funny. Try watching a French-Canadian baseball game or a Major-League Soccer game of two US teams broadcast in Spanish.

As for his accent, it is actually quite good French, and they are certainly very French names, no matter how the contestants pronounce them.

Vidéo impressionnante!

Does he talk like that with the accent always? In that case that really isn't a bad thing and it would be a little juvenile to laugh at him.
On the other hand, if he makes this umm...adjustment only while pronouncing the names then its friggin hilarious.

Sanjaya forever!!! :D

He talks with that idiotic fake accent only for the French contestants! Ben's such a douche.

Signatures SUCK!

Classic! Thanks, Darklighter.

Tight video, but you missed something. I recall him calling our favorite underage :( Qper "KatRRAN" several times during her Top 24 performance.

(PS never mind, you did catch Benny pronouncing Katherine in Francais. Yup, douche baguette indeed.)

The only Bellerose I know is the neighborhood in Queens and the suburb in Long Island.

Most people (in Canada, anyway) know that Ben's father, Brian Mulroney, was the Prime Minister here from 1984-1993. He was a native of Quebec, grew up speaking both English and French and spoke both with the fluency of a native speaker. Ben Grew up in Ottawa and Quebec and similarly was taught to speak both languages from birth. He speaks both fluently and views them equally as his first language. So when he says the French names correctly he is not putting on an accent that is not legitimately his own.

It would be a valid criticism of Ben if he did not really speak French and was trying to hard to sound French when he says the names, but this is different. It actually is very common in Quebec for fluently bilingual radio and television hosts to pronounce both French and English names with an authentic accent even if the conversation is otherwise in the other language.

Ben is not "trying" to pronounce the names the way he does. In fact, he would probably have to self-consiously try to get the names wrong if he said them the way uniligual anglophones usually do. Don't get me wrong - Ben is an anoying idiot for oh so many reasons. But this is not one of them.

Mark E. Mark: you are right on about Ben's ability to speak French, and that he learned it from an early enough age that the "phenoms" of the language are hard-wired and the accent is authentic.

However, it still kills me how he switches back and forth. And it's cute to watch the American's having fun with it. :)

A better example of Canadians with annoying fake accents: Alex Trebek. His attempts at accenting in dozens of different languages are hilarious. It's as forced as when Peggy Hill on King of the Hill tries to switch to Spanish.