Familiar language, anglicisms and sometimes even vulgarities make their way daily to the ears of listeners tuned into public or private radio stations in Quebec. This is at least the finding of a new study on the state of French on the radio, the conclusions of which were presented for the first time on Tuesday at the Acfas congress.
“Air time is a privilege. What is heard can influence and be reproduced by some of the listeners. What we hear on the air becomes an acceptable norm in society,” says Marie-Josée Olsen, teacher-researcher at the Higher School of Media Art and Technology at the Cégep de Jonquière, in an interview.
For her study, she sifted through no fewer than 40 live shows, all in the morning time slot. To establish a fair and global portrait, she was interested in both public and private radio, choosing national, regional and ultralocal broadcasts.
For the exercise, only the words of those in the field – presenters, journalists or columnists – were analyzed, i.e. 134 people in total. “They are the ones who have a standard [de langage] to maintain, not the invited speakers,” explains Mme Olsen.
Result ? “Char”, “frette”, “niaisage”, “pogner” or even “cossins”: the colloquial language is found in all the programs listened to. Anglicisms (“the gang” at the top of the list) also slip in each time, while, in 38 out of 40 broadcasts, we note improprieties of language.
The researcher also noted the use of “very familiar” words – softened swear words, like “tabarnouche” or “tabarnane” for example – in almost half of the cases (17 out of 40 broadcasts). A quarter of the broadcasts (10 out of 40) contained vulgar words, i.e. swear words, words relating to sexuality or scatology. “There are a lot of coronations on the air,” notes the researcher. We expected to find colloquial language and anglicisms there, but vulgar language is new to my knowledge. »
“We are still talking about morning shows which oscillate between information and entertainment, giving the weather, traffic, the topics of the day,” she continues. There is a certain professional standard to maintain, we are not in a podcast of humor. »
Deliberate choices
The grammatical and syntactic code is also not always well respected by radio professionals. Almost all of the shows in the study contained “lame constructions,” that is, truncated or rephrased sentences. Three-quarters had preposition, agreement or gender errors.
In more than half of the cases, it was the use of pronouns, the conjugation of verbs or even the presence of indirect structures that was lacking.
“In the end, it is the choice of words that is more problematic than the construction of sentences. There is a choice that is made when we decide to say “char” instead of “car” or “toune” instead of “song”,” points out M.me Olsen.
In light of the data collected, she sees in this shift towards familiar and popular language a desire of radio artisans to get “closer to the listener”. Those who work in the media, however, have a duty to maintain a professional standard and to express themselves in fair and credible French, she adds.
Improvement
The data shows that we can improve. And radio artisans are aware of this. As part of the study, Mme Olsen had 65 community volunteers complete a questionnaire to find out their perception of the quality of French on the air.
The majority said they were “concerned” about the quality of the language and “open to improvement”. Most people believe that the quality of French has deteriorated over time, but that it remains sufficient. “It surprised me to see that, for [artisans du milieu] it is the anglicisms that are most disturbing, and this even seems to be an indicator of quality. » The community did not seem to think that the presence of vulgarities could disturb the public as much, notes the author of the study.
For her part, she intends to use these results to adapt her oral expression course at the Jonquière CEGEP. “The idea is to see the linguistic trends, the tolerances in the market and to adapt to them. It also allows me to fill in the gaps, to emphasize certain points in my training,” she concludes.