May is traditionally a month of celebration for science in French thanks to the marvelous voice that is the Acfas Congress. At 100 years, the Acfas nevertheless displays a mine more worried than happy. It is because the retreat of the language of Molière, Tremblay or Senghor has accelerated so much that it now takes on the appearance of a free fall. Hard sciences and soft sciences combined.
Published on the eve of the scientific high mass, an analysis of grant applications for the past 30 years has enabled Radio-Canada to confirm tenacious intuitions. French-speaking researchers not only have fewer resources, but their projects are more often shunned in favor of those in English. And not just a little. For example, of all the grants awarded by the three federal agencies that fund research in the country, 95% were awarded to projects written in English, between 2019 and 2022.
The next generation is not fooled. She can see that the rug is slipping under her feet. In a recent letter to Duty, Québec’s chief scientist, Rémi Quirion, relays the fundamental questions that plague doctoral and postdoctoral scholarship holders from the Fonds de recherche du Québec, which he directs. If they do not deny the essential nature of French, these scholars point out that it can quickly become an obstacle when it comes to publishing or progressing in a competitive environment like theirs.
This is how only 15% write only or mainly in French. We cannot blame these young researchers for wanting to advance their work. We can even less ask them to carry on their own shoulders the weight of the necessary battle to be waged in order to put an end to this intolerable linguistic double standard.
Unfortunately, the message does not get through. Last February, again for a text published in The dutyBloc Québécois MP Maxime Blanchette-Joncas took to the keyboard to be alarmed by the fact that “Marie-Victorin’s language is dying in science” in the generalized indifference of a federal government “to absent subscribers”.
In March, the Advisory Committee on the Federal Research Support System added a layer. In a scathing report, he deemed it “imperative” that applications submitted to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council be treated — and supported — with exactly the same opening and the same energy. whatever their language.
But tapping the fingers of the granting agencies has little effect. And it is not the $8.5 million over five years intended for Support for the creation and dissemination of scientific information in French announced last month by the Trudeau government that will turn the tide. It is urgent that Canada adopt a solid national strategy to support research in French before French-speaking researchers abdicate completely.
The Trudeau government must also look beyond coast to coast. The Francophonie has more than 320 million speakers spread across the four corners of the globe. May he make the most of it. Next June, Montreal will host a summer school on science diplomacy, a recent but promising concept, which it is high time to give a boost to, first and foremost in Ottawa.
He will not be alone in this field. French is not the only language in a skin of shagreen on the world scientific chessboard; many other languages are in retreat before English. However, behind the ease — and the hard and stumbling advantages — that there can be in publishing in the lingua franca of the moment, there is more than a tragic series of cultural obliterations. The decline of multilingual science is indeed a sign of a decline in science, period.
At the Agence Science-France, which devotes an excellent file to the decline of French in science in favor of the Acfas Congress, the linguist Anne-Claude Berthoud explains that universal communication is an illusion that ends up causing an impoverishment of knowledge and the quality of scientific knowledge. She calls this phenomenon the “McDonaldization” of science. A disease that can be cured with… plurilingualism! We don’t get out.
To this remedy, Mr. Quirion’s young scholarship recipients add the creation of a network promoting the dissemination and mobility of knowledge in the Francophonie. It is also necessary, they say, to better finance French-language journals and scholarly knowledge disseminators and to increase efficient translation tools. We applaud.
Faced with the immense challenges facing the planet, starting with the climate emergency, it seems essential to keep alive knowledge whose finesse can only blossom in the diversity of languages and cultural sensitivities. We won’t get there if we all take the same way of thinking.