The author is a historian, sociologist, writer and retired teacher from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi in the history, sociology, anthropology, political science and international cooperation programs. His research focuses on collective imaginations.
This is a subject that has been the subject of stormy debate for a long time after the publication in 1960 of the Insolences of brother so-and-so, a book in which the author stormed against the poor state of our language: badly spoken, badly taught, badly learned… At the beginning, unanimity reigned among those who had French at heart (“good French”) and were the harbingers of the decadence, if not the disappearance of our language, this jewel of our heritage. It was urgently necessary to launch a great crusade to eradicate this dishonorable patois.
And then, to the almost general amazement, a group of leftist intellectuals (mostly grouped around the review bias) maintained that, on the contrary, Joual is our real language, the one spoken by the majority of the population after having learned it in the cradle: Joual, it was said, is a language which resembles us with its scars, its clumsiness, his freedoms and his inventions. It is our language, the one that reflects us and tells us, in short, the language of authenticity rather than borrowing. Soon, the debate took on the appearance of a lively opposition between the party of the elites and that of the people. Henceforth, literary men had to “choose between the stable and the academy” (J. Godbout).
However, the fight for the survival and the quality of the language has not lost its vigor, but it has shifted away from the joual front—even the word has disappeared. What happened ?
The eclipse of Joual
Three possible explanations come to mind. The first is social. The debate, as we have just seen, referred to affiliations, to very clearly defined social cleavages, familiar from the most elementary sociology: scholarly (or elitist) culture versus popular culture. But this representation is no longer valid today, it has been disqualified by the evolution of the social structure.
As elsewhere, between these two major referents, hybrid forms have emerged which, for want of a better term, are referred to as the all-inclusive notion of the middle classes. At the same time, the social radian of the elites has also widened while that of the so-called popular class has contracted. The differentiation of tastes, lifestyles and dialects followed. This blurring disqualifies the old identifications between classes and languages.
A second explanation lies in the rather strange fact that the joual was never precisely defined (there was, however, a growing agreement that it was exclusive to the “people”). The word designated both French anglicized through numerous contacts with English, French deformed, impoverished, paralyzed in its evolution by Anglo-American colonialism, the Canadian language inherited from our distant ancestors. Each of these definitions is problematic.
Frequent contact with English. They were mainly due to the Montreal region. We can therefore think that this influence affected the business elite as much if not more than the working classes. But how could it strongly affect the regions?
An effect of colonialism. By what paths could he disfigure popular speech?
Canadian speaking. Hasn’t it always been considered the purest and richest vein of our speech? By what miracle would it have been preserved? Another difficulty: this traditional speech was commonly associated with the rural world, an environment particularly favorable to its preservation.
Finally, a third explanation concerns the origin of the joual. Proponents of good speech commonly denounced laxity, guilty recklessness, and even betrayal of tradition, all aggravated by negligent, incompetent, and irresponsible teachers. In the other camp (which could be described as “joualist”), there was no reason to complain. Our national language was prospering, all was well, as in the Candid of Voltaire.
Another approach
In the present state, the reflection on the joual does not therefore advance us much, because the data of the problem are new. The use of social referents is outdated, it is our whole society that is affected. The explanations concerning the origin of our difficulties no longer hold, because they now have less to do with colonialism and a lot with globalization and social networks, which have given English a new prestige, a new impetus.
As a result, all nations are now threatened. The vagueness surrounding the exact nature of joual is no longer an important factor, we know well what our language suffers from: a) increasing borrowings from vocabulary and expressions from the English language; b) increasingly intensive, often unconscious, recourse to the syntax of this language; c) its imprint on the very organization of thought and on its expression.
We need to broaden the reflection and insert it into an analysis process on an international scale. For example, it would be useful to observe how other nations are affected by the same evil and if possible to learn some lessons from how they fight it.
Clarification: I said that colonialism was no longer an important factor, fine. But how to explain this mania (present in all our media) which consists in constantly slipping between parentheses the English translation of a word or an expression? Isn’t that a way to discredit our language