Windsor has a unique take on French street names. Here's a look at why

Peer-ee. Drew-lard. Oh-let.

When it comes to French street names, Windsorites have pronunciations all their own. Nothing quite demonstrates someone is truly local to Windsor like the way they refer to certain roadways.

But how did such a phenomenon develop?

"There are some kind of odd ones there," admits Marcel Beneteau, an author and retired professor of French-Canadian folklore.

"Some can be fairly easily explained. Others kind of defy any logical explanation."

For example, the way Windsorites pronounce Pierre Avenue — perhaps our most noticeably weird speaking quirk.

Anywhere else in the world, Beneteau says, the pronunciation would be obvious. But not in Windsor.

"I don't know what the problem is. People can say Pierre Trudeau, people can say Pierre Poilievre. Why can't they say Pierre Avenue?" Beneteau laments. "I can't think of any historical or linguistic explanation for that."

"It rhymes with Erie Street? I don't know."

Windsor-born resident Benjamin Daher says it's amusing to him and his colleagues that GPS navigation voices and map apps can never vocalize the city's routes the way that locals do.

"I do say 'Peer-ee,' because of my grandparents... Everyone in the area has always called it that," Daher says. "It's 'Peer-ee.' If you call it 'Pea-air,' everyone corrects you."

Perhaps we should understand why Windsor has a lot of French street names in the first place.

Many of the roads that run north-south take their names from French families that originally settled the area more than 270 years ago.

The French regime at the time granted land parcels to families with surnames such as Ouellette, Pelissier and Lauzon.