The Point of View section is seeing the blossoming of a new branch, Point of Language, with Professor Mireille Elchacar as its guide. During the summer, the Quebec lexicologist will invite you to think about French differently in a one-off format halfway between an essay and popular science.
One thing has always seemed incongruous to me in our relationship with language in Quebec: if, as a people, we are so attached to our language, why are we so critical of its speakers, that is, those who bring it to life? Yet there is ample reason to be proud of the path we have taken.
First, there is the obvious: French is still present in America. One can even wonder whether its vitality is as weakened as the talk of the decline of French suggests.
The Office québécois de la langue française recently published a study with this encouraging statistic: “In 2023, the rate of availability of service in French in the businesses visited was 98% in all urban areas studied.” Unfortunately, it was not relayed by the media, which remain on the surface with the famous “Hello!” Hi ! ».
In the book French in decline? Rethinking the Quebec Francophoniesociologist Jean-Pierre Corbeil and his colleagues take a critical look at the choice of indicators to measure the linguistic situation.
We base ourselves on the language spoken at home, while the domain of the Charter of the French Language is the public language: “To clearly highlight the decline of French in Quebec, many observers and key players have repeatedly stated the proportion of 48% of the population speaking French at home in Montreal. But where does this number come from? In fact, it refers only to the share of the population that speaks only French most often at home on the island of Montreal.”
However, the fact that immigrants speak their mother tongue at home, which is also a fundamental right, does not mean that they have not adopted French as a language at work or at school. My personal story illustrates this: my family spoke Arabic at home, but French is the language of all of us in the public sphere.
Francization
This does not mean that there is not much to do. I am thinking, for example, of the francization of immigrants. Faced with the failures of Francisation Québec, reported among others by The Dutythis sector seems to need additional resources and better coordination to Frenchify new arrivals earlier, for longer and better.
Vitality aside, Quebec should be proud of its contributions to the French language, made possible by its emancipation from France. Other languages with large geographical deployment, such as English, Spanish or Portuguese, are quick to detach themselves from their historical center as a source of legitimacy. They do not wait for Great Britain, Spain or Portugal to approve their uses. Of course, their demographic weight has something to do with it.
This emancipation is not insignificant. Because of the kilometers that separate us from France and the centuries since French was established in America, our language differs in several ways from the French that ended up becoming the norm in Paris. Turning to France to endorse our uses can only generate linguistic insecurity.
Linguistic autonomy
Linguist Bernard Pöll defines three indicators of the degree of autonomy of a linguistic community in relation to a centre: feminization, terminology and attitude towards spelling reforms.
While feminization is still a subject of discussion in France, Quebec has been creating its own feminine forms for a long time. A study that colleagues and I presented at the last ACFAS congress shows that Quebec is more open to the proposal to reform past participle agreements than France and Belgium.
As for terminological development, it often goes hand in hand in Quebec with the proposal of French equivalents to replace anglicisms. Since the relationship of Quebecers to anglicisms is not the same as that of the French, rather than waiting for their recommendations, the Office québécois de la langue française makes its own proposals, through the Grand Dictionnaire terminologique.
All these elements surrounding the standard of Quebec French bring up an aspect that I would add to Pöll’s list: that of dictionaries. Many studies have shown that the general dictionaries produced in France, even if they are excellent, cannot satisfy all speakers of the French-speaking world equally.
Linguist Hélène Cajolet-Laganière summarizes these problems in an article on the development of a standard specific to Quebec French. How, in fact, can one describe in a single work all the cultures of the Francophonie, all the realities specific to each country?
In THE Little Robertthe blackbird is black, unlike our red-breasted blackbird (robin). The feminine forms are those of France: under “mayor”, we give the examples “Madame le maire or la maire”, impossible here.
Anglicisms are not always criticized (“baby-sitter” does not contain any usage marker), and the French equivalents proposed do not always correspond to usage in Quebec (under “ferry-boat”, the reference to “traversier” is alongside “bac”, “transbordeur” and… “car-ferry”).
All this led to the creation of Usito, a general dictionary that describes the standard register of Quebec French, and which has exceeded the 10 million consultation mark worldwide. While the United States and English-speaking Canada, Mexico, etc. have had their own dictionary for a long time, no French-speaking community outside France had yet produced a general (and not differential) dictionary that primarily describes its geographical variety of French.
Let us be proud of what we have done to protect French and make it flourish. And let us roll up our sleeves for the future: we are fully capable of meeting the next challenges.