The reluctance to learn written French in Quebec is not harmless. One of the harms of the economy of grammatical analysis, for example, is to deprive oneself of the formation of a logical mind, of the development of analytical skills — analysis of an event or a text. The soothing remarks against learning to write and the slightest effort risk the withering away of the linguistic status of Quebec.
It is through writing that we arrive at a mastered oral. Just as we cannot make music without learning scales and chords, we cannot express ourselves with nuance and intelligibility without having tamed the rules of our language. By cutting back on the structures of writing, it is thought itself that we corrode.
Contempt for the structures of a language is the more or less rapid path to its dissolution. Some postulate that the difficulty of expressing oneself is caused by written French — when it is the opposite. When we do not teach writing or no longer teach it because we are incapable of it, because those who are supposed to do it have not 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 decline in written French in Quebec is that it is the Trojan horse for a hybridization of the language in favor of American. It is not a question of purism here but of survival if, of course, we want it, if pride, “the foundation of the future of French,” as your editor opportunely reminds us in an editorial, is present.
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