We should not believe, as some claim, that “playing with the language” – a euphemism for the reluctance to learn writing or the refusal to do so – is harmless. This practice, which is harmful to French, does not protect us from anglicization, on the contrary. Soporific remarks against it risk being fatal to us. What we call progress often turns out to be a regression, in terms of the evolution of the language as elsewhere, when we claim to simplify writing.
Writing is the substrate, the grounding wire (ground), the codification of all orality, even of all articulated speech (unless orality is made into a noise, a babble). It is by going through writing that we arrive at a mastered oral. The sirens of laziness push humans to cut back on the difficulties of writing, but in doing so, it is thought itself that they corrode. These invitations to the least effort also turn out to be dogmatic, with formulas like “research has shown that”: in other words, the discussion is closed.
The dissolution or disregard of the rules of language forms the path to Babelism, to what resembles aphasia. Millennia of perfecting language capacity will have served only to return to the initial grumbling. Who doubts it has never listened to a conversation between pre-teens. And we push bad faith to the point of placing the responsibility for this drift on written French: of course, when we do not teach or no longer teach writing because we are incapable of it, because those who are supposed to do so have not even had the chance to learn it, this writing remains unassimilated. We thus arrive at the result that speakers speak while being illiterate.
The disadvantage of a weakening of the French language in Quebec is not a taking of comfort with Grevisse grammar, it is to be gradually the Trojan horse of an anglicization, of a hybridization of the language for the benefit of the American. It is not a question of purism here, but of survival or extinction. The survival of a nation is accompanied by an express condition, that of loving its language to the point of not putting one’s hand to it at every turn like a malleable dough.
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