There you go, I admit it. I live surrounded by enemies of the nation. By enemies of the nation, I mean here all those ugly rascals who contribute to the decline of the French language. And contributing to the decline of the French language, of course, means not having French as a “mother tongue” and “main language spoken at home”. Or at least, that is how demographers and politicians mainly choose to measure the vitality of the French language, mainly in Quebec, and also elsewhere in Canada. With this methodology, anyone who does not have French as their first language or who does not use it exclusively in their intimacy is therefore counted as contributing to the decline of the French language. Enemies of the nation, so there are quite a few.
I am thinking of this new colleague, N. N.’s grandparents arrived from Italy before the implementation of Bill 101. N. grew up on the North Shore of the Montreal region, and attended the English school. But in this small municipality, French is the common language. Even at school, N. most often spoke French with the other students, in an informal context. Today, N. works mainly in French. It is in French that we will work together. But N. does not have French as her mother tongue. And for a long time she shared a roommate in Montreal with unilingual Anglophone students from elsewhere in Canada. In the statistics, N. therefore counts as an agent of the decline of the French language.
And what about this old friend, J., born in Alberta in a family originally from Bangladesh. As soon as he arrived in Montreal, J. enrolled in an intensive French course. J. and I have always spoken French together — even when words failed him and English would have been easier. J. also always insisted on communicating in French in restaurants and in stores. But for demographers, these efforts count for nothing, since English and Bengali continued to occupy a preponderant place in his life. After founding two companies in Quebec, J. left to live in the United States. So much the better for French, you will say.
And then there’s my old roommate. E. is a child of Law 101, who began his school career in the reception classes, arriving from Colombia. When he lived with his family, of course, he had Spanish as the main language spoken at home. As an adult, it is above all French that is now preponderant, at home and in almost all of his social life. But in his work, E. is called upon to work with people from all over the planet — French and English rub shoulders. E. is therefore also an agent of language decline: he cannot change his mother tongue, and despite having studied 100% in French, French is not his only working language. The case of. can quite be counted, according to the statistics chosen, as proof of the failure of Law 101.
And then myself, you see, I am an ex-assimilated. Although my mother tongue is French, I left to continue my studies in Toronto for my master’s degree, and I lived with people who did not speak French during my mid-twenties. So much so that during the 2016 census, I no longer had French as the language spoken at home. While working in a research center on the Francophonie in a minority setting, and bringing a Quebec and Francophone perspective to several pan-Canadian organizations with which I collaborated, I was officially counted as proof of the decline of the language.
At the 2020 census, however, I was rid of my Anglo roommates, and therefore back to the side of the “good” language spoken at home. I don’t think I was less French-speaking in 2016 than in 2020, but hey, the experts must know that better than me.
Jean-Benoit Nadeau, of News, published an important series in two stages on the dubious value of the indicators chosen to diagnose the decline of the French language. We see that the categories of francophone, anglophone and allophone were put forward in public discourse during the 1970s, in a society profoundly different from today’s world. Despite the generational change, the public debate continues to insist on the mother tongue — an immutable fact, which makes people count as “threats” to the language all their life, regardless of their behavior and learning.
Or again, we base our diagnosis of decline on the choice of language spoken at home, which implies that people of immigrant origin must have completely denied or forgotten their heritage language in order to finally stop being dangerous for the French.
It would be quite possible to take an interest in the place that French takes in people’s lives in a much less coarse way, by including of course these notions, but not only. Many sociolinguists already do this, moreover. But they are not the ones who dictate the framework of the public debate.
There are so many people who speak French, love French, and live an important part of their daily lives in French, and who count, with the dominant methodologies, as proof of the decline of French. So many people that we no longer really know what reality sticks, basically, the figures that circulate the most.
I don’t see how, by stubbornly using almost exclusively statistical tools that are unsuitable for painting an accurate portrait of the sociolinguistic situation in Quebec and Canada, we are protecting the language. Maybe I’m too confused in my multilingual bad French-speaking brain that flirts with assimilation to fully understand.