We learned about it in a French magazine. Well almost. Rather an American magazine published in France. This already tells us a lot. It is indeed the magazine Vogue who revealed the news to us in just one sentence. A very small piece of information slipped between two lines of a long interview. But it also says a lot. Thus, Celine Dion would speak English to her children.
We won’t make a big deal out of it. Everyone regulates their private life as they see fit. But everyone also knows how many children raised in this very particular kind of bilingualism that we find in Canada have every chance of ending up speaking this also very particular variety of French which characterizes, for example, the Canadian Prime Minister. I take this example because it is the most telling, but we could cite thousands of similar cases where the words are all in French, but everything else in English. Thought too.
The same day, I came across this article revealing that students at a high school in western Montreal were demanding the right to express themselves in English outside of class. Here, we are not witnessing the disappearance of French, but a form of generalized bilingualization that could be described as Louisianaization. We will forgive the foreign correspondent, even though he is a thousand kilometers from Vaudreuil, for not remaining indifferent to such news. Especially since he could have heard essentially the same thing in a college in the Paris suburbs. Of course, here, it is not about English, but we see the same disinterest and the same renunciation with regard to French culture.
The common point between Vaudreuil and Romans-sur-Isère is what we must call migratory submersion. In both cases, a population with an immigrant background has come to constitute a sufficiently large majority to slow down or completely stop its integration. In short, the majority no longer has the numbers to impose its language, its customs and its culture. At this stage, it is no longer a question of good or bad will, of adequate or inadequate services, even less of kindness and welcome. Simply in number.
It was the academician Jean Clair who wrote, after having lived for a long time in the United States, that he left this country the day he discovered to his amazement that he dreamed in English. Not sure that the young people of Vaudreuil and Romans-sur-Isère dream in the language and culture of Molière.
Contrary to what we are constantly told, it takes years to develop an attachment to a culture or a language and deploy all its roots. This is even more true, at the time of the educational collapse, for a language where writing has always led the way with its connections, its endings, its grammatical genres, the extreme finesse of its silent “e”. and these multiple nuances which make it all the difficulty, but also the extraordinary beauty.
To suggest that we become French or Quebecois and that we speak French correctly in a few years or even in a single generation is already a lie — ask the Governor General of Canada! Not to say a scam invented by these managers of planetary disorder for whom migrants are basically just a form of human livestock that is moved from one continent to another according to the needs of the moment. Nothing is more normal than this deculturation – also called “decivilization” – of a stateless population which no longer has the reference points of its country of origin and for whom it will take a long time to acquire new ones. How can we be surprised in this context that the language and culture of the master impose themselves quite naturally?
Because globalization does not wait. Add to this observation the decolonial ideology – which, strangely, is most often expressed in English – and you will understand why in these circles, in France as in Quebec, French and its culture are often considered with a certain haughtiness. From there to the defenders of French being tomorrow qualified as extreme right, there is only one step. I’m ready to take the bets.
All this occurs, as the sociolinguist Lionel Meney writes, at a time when we are witnessing “the progressive reduction of the territory of French, of the number of situations in which its use is possible, even necessary, its loss of influence as a language of international communication, diplomacy, science, commercial techniques, sports and culture.
In his latest book (The shipwreck of French, the triumph of English, PUL), Meney carefully records the progression of English in France and its penetration even into the morphology of the language. As you will have understood, Meney is not one of those linguists who are content to say smugly that “language evolves”.
A cliché to which the writer Alain Borer quite rightly responded that if “language evolves, so does cancer”.