The reflections of the author, born in Togo, are based on the relationship to languages found in particular in French-speaking Africa. Thanks to several comparisons, he manages to offer an original portrait of Quebec’s linguistic insecurity.
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Québécois, practiced exclusively in North America in the province of Quebec, could hypothetically disappear. It is therefore appropriate to separate the destiny of Quebec from the future of the French language, especially since the gap of misunderstanding is widening between the two variants. This preservation of the Québécois must go hand in hand with the solidarity defense of the Canadian Francophonie, without omitting the Aboriginal languages. The survival of the latter is also on borrowed time in the face of the linguistic imperialism of two of the most invasive European languages (French and English). Quebec should be passionate about these endangered languages1, rather than fearing the death of the French language, which will never happen. Each time one of these languages dies, the world becomes poorer.
The prevailing linguistic declinism is consonant with the declinist tropism that has obsessed Western civilization for almost always. It’s a narcissism specific to writing cultures that like to play at scaring themselves. How can cultures steeped in the cult of writing and archives and endowed with institutions for the promotion of their languages spend so much time living in the nonchalance of such linguistic anxiety, even though the oral cultures that are most at risk of extinction don’t care? This is a most intriguing paradox. What explains the absence of anxiety about the extinction of languages among nomadic and thirsty peoples? On the one hand, these peoples receive their oral languages as inheritances without wills, without codes, without prescriptive dictionaries. This leaves them full latitude for fruitful conquests, abandonments without reasons, and borrowings without limits. On the other hand, the Moba, Fon or Fang peoples of Africa do not live in the apocalyptic anguish of the inevitable disappearance of their languages, because they are perhaps aware that they are not immune to entropy. They are born, evolve and die… without this preventing people from continuing their historical trajectories.
Besides, written languages never really die. It happens that they cease to be in use, that no one speaks of them anymore. But, as long as they have been written down, underlines the linguist Claude Hagège, their systems persist for eternity.
Dead languages can sometimes resurrect and come back to life, as was the case with Hebrew from the 1920s. Indeed, it went from its former status as a language of prayer to that of an official state language. from israel2.
The anguish of extinction among peoples of the written word is similar to a mania of hypochondriacs. This feeling of vulnerability stems from the primordial anguish that poisons the “magnificent invention” of writing. The specter of oblivion hangs like a shadow on the ground of writing, just as each remedy produces its own poison. The scriptural tool is clouded from the outset by the fear of memory loss. In the myth of Toth, commented on by Plato then Derrida, writing is reputed to propagate amnesia, because it dispenses the elites of writing with knowledge and produces the illusion of knowledge. The offering of the Egyptian god of writing, Thoth, was not the pharmakon (remedy) promised to oblivion and lack of science, because confident in writing, men seek outside and no longer within the means of remembering. The contemporary fear of the death of written languages is only one symptom of this anxiety associated with the invention of writing. Ipso facto, the absence of this atrabilaire among “peoples without writing” can be explained by the simple fact that this luxury of melancholy linking writing and erasure of memory is completely foreign to them.
The Anoufoh language, for example, which I inherited from my mother, is only spoken in an extremely patchy linguistic ecosystem that winds its way through northeastern Ghana, northern Togo and northwestern Benin. With a native-speaker population of just 200,000 speaking a denatured variant of Ivory Coast Baoulé that has undergone similar translocation and mutation to French in Quebec. Since then, it has stood on the threshold of a line of flight, between the reassuring edges of homonymy with root-Baoulé and the dizzying outbursts of a new semantics that feeds on encounters and borrowings. Clearly, when the baoulé hears the anoufoh spoken, he thinks he recognizes a distant sonic parentage, but when he gets closer, the misunderstanding takes over. It was in fact only a faded echo in the distance which separates the Ivory Coast from Togo.
1. Using the formula “The Caribbean has not disappeared, they have disappeared”, Édouard Glissant conjures up the absence of the Caribbean peoples, establishing a difference between the erasure of disappearance and the vestiges, even the invisible presences that a disappearance leaves in its wake.
2. Claude Hagege, Stop the death of languages, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2000, p. 343-346. ; Claude Hagege, Language lovers dictionaryPlon-Odile Jacob, Paris, 2009.
Créoliser le Québécois – Reflections on language, identity and replenishment
Radjoul Mouhamadou
Somme editions, March 2022
136 pages
Who is Radjoul Mouhamadou?
Radjoul Mouhamadou was born in Togo. Formerly a political journalist, this sociologist by training arrived in Canada in 2016. Since then, he has lived in Quebec, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in international studies at Laval University.