This text is part of the special Francophonie booklet
How do minority Francophones in Canada perceive their language and their accent through the prism of media such as Radio-Canada? Do these perceptions contribute to a certain linguistic insecurity and to a weakening of the language? As part of her thesis at Université Laval, sociolinguist Adéla Šebková is looking into these questions.
Sociolinguistics researcher Adéla Šebková prepares to leave Winnipeg, Manitoba, to board a train for Edmonton, Alberta, the penultimate stop of her tour that started in Sudbury and ends in Halifax. As always, she will stay on site for a month to ask Francophones how they feel represented in the national media.
The answer is not long in coming: “The discrepancy between the French spoken at Radio-Canada, very Quebecois, even Montrealer, creates insecurity among Francophones in a minority setting: they do not feel heard. Recently, I read comments from Internet users even wondering ironically if the Manitoba newscast hadn’t been made in Paris: the host and several journalists on the team were French. This creates a strangeness; people wonder: “Is this really about my community?” »
Media Responsibility
In practice, however, she observes that the newscasts give the locals a chance to speak, who express themselves with their accent and their expressions, but these are only guests or witnesses: the presenters and the journalists, the incarnation of the media prestige, most often come from outside… and return there just as quickly, in a context of high staff turnover. “They may mispronounce place names, which causes them to lose credibility. This problem of accent would be less awkward if the journalists remained on the spot longer. »
However, it must be recognized that if so few journalists come from local communities, it is also due to a lack of human resources: journalism training programs in French are almost non-existent.
I would like there to be less complexes, for people to understand that it is ok to speak in different ways and that, from a linguistic point of view, there is not one right way to speak
However, this whole issue is important because, as the researcher points out, the media space is, along with school, a key space for legitimizing and promoting the language. The consequences in the event of a “media dropout” are very real: people turn to French-language community media when they exist or else they definitively opt for English-language media, which is detrimental to the maintenance and development of French.
“When you no longer hear your language in the media, that limits the use of French, especially for people who have not been educated in French-language schools or who no longer speak French so much in their families. »
Fight against linguistic insecurity
Through her work, Adéla Šebková would like to support the national broadcaster in its approach aimed at promoting the different accents of the Canadian Francophonie and, as a sociolinguistic enthusiast, she would also like to contribute to alleviating the linguistic insecurity she perceives, especially in the Western Canada, where many feel embarrassed to speak Franglais.
“I would like there to be less complexes, for people to understand that it’s okay to speak in different ways and that, linguistically, there is no one right way to speak, all that being a social construct. When you live in a situation of language contact, like the French speakers here in an English-speaking sea, mixing is inevitable. Is it a threat? Is it bad in itself? Not necessarily. We shouldn’t feel bad anyway. And then, it would be too difficult to access this idealized standard French which does not really exist: the language varies according to the places and the situations of communication. »
Even if francophones in a minority situation in Canada are not, according to her, the object of linguistic discrimination (or glottophobia), this work on the self-perception of their language makes it possible to confirm that if some feel proud of their French and their culture, others feel weakened, and that linguistically non-inclusive media can contribute to this self-devaluation.
Adéla Šebková continues her research and field interviews, armed, in addition to all her skills, with an original asset: her Czech origins. Partly educated in French in her own country, then later studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, she learned French, which she now speaks impeccably, with a very slight hint… of an accent!
“When I present myself here, my interlocutors, impressed that I have learned French, and happy to see that people from outside are interested in them, do not experience linguistic complexes, on the contrary, there are immediately a certain confidence, even a complicity. And then, she adds in a spontaneous laugh, as the Czechs are also passionate about ice hockey, we are immediately liked a lot! »