In honor of the holidays, the editorial team is today closing its reflection on the individual and collective challenges that will shape our world over the coming years, from the perspective of solutions, wherever possible. Today: the vitality of French.
In the formidable epic of French in America, there will never be peace of mind. Whether this epic is conjugated to the past, the present or the future, the French language, the culture as well as the institutions it has generated navigate the troubled waters of insecurity, threat or decline. It is an inevitable fate on a continent with a majority English-speaking population and on a planet where English asserts itself as the dominant language of business and the consumption of cultural goods.
The question is not whether French should be protected in Quebec and Canada, but rather how to achieve this while respecting the rights of minorities. Between the 2016 census and that of 2021, most indicators on the future of French point in the wrong direction. The proportion of Quebecers whose mother tongue is French fell from 77.1% to 74.8%. Those who speak it mainly at home increased from 79% to 77.5%. In Canada, French as the first language spoken decreased from 22.2% to 21.4%. In Montreal, French is the first official language spoken by only 58.4% of the population, a critical threshold.
Demographers, politicians and language enthusiasts fall into two camps. Pessimists see the decline of French as a mother tongue as a precursor of an inevitable “Louisianization” of Quebec, marked by the rapid anglicization of Montreal. They also announce the planned end of Canadian bilingualism, to the extent that Francophones outside Quebec will be condemned, in the near future, to losing the critical mass essential to the vitality of their institutions.
The other camp, which cannot be described as optimistic, sees signs of progress in the fact that the proportion of Quebecers capable of carrying on a conversation in French remains stable at 93.7%. After all, it is in the public space, rather than in the private sphere of the home, that a language policy produces the desired effect. This camp also recalls the tremendous success of Law 101 to educate primary and secondary school children in French and the strong presence of French in the public space.
These “burning chapels” are harsh towards each other, the vigorous debate of ideas in our platforms being proof of this, as if the same language should separate them instead of uniting them. This divide hides another that political scientists Jean-Marc Piotte and Jean-Pierre Couture have exposed in their work, between the proponents of neoconservative thought and those of pluralist thought in the debate on Quebec identity. These issues have been well popularized in our pages by Alex Bilodeau. While neoconservative thought makes the French-Canadian heritage the anchor of the Quebec nation, pluralist thought is limited to considering French as the common language that defines the nation. It is the “we” as well as the aspirations of cohesion and shared memory on one side. It is otherness as well as the hybrid and mixed identity of the other.
Reality accommodates gray areas between these two cases, but they are useful for better understanding the linguistic debate and the antagonisms generated by the analysis of this double phenomenon of pessimism (on the decline of French as a mother tongue). ) and optimism (on the stability of the proportion of Quebecers capable of carrying on a conversation in French).
These clashes leave little room for the challenge that we will all have to take on to ensure the growth of French. Over the decades, we have fought necessary normative and legislative battles aimed at protecting French as a collective right taking precedence over individual rights. They have made us lose sight of the founding foundation of our actions. What is the value of a language decoupled from its culture? A modern, mixed culture, focused on the world and, yes, pluralist!
Today’s warning signs offer us an opportunity to mobilize across divides of intellectual thought and party lines. Whether the Legault government is too tough or too soft matters less than the need to summarize the challenges to be met in education, work, francization, culture, etc.
French as a language massacred in CEGEP, the production constraints of youth programs, the starving offer of cultural outings for our young people, the decline of French-speaking university research, the shameful gaps in the integration and Frenchization of immigrants, the invisibility of French-speaking content in digital worlds dominated by GAFAM: these are some convincing examples of the pitfalls that threaten the vitality of French. We cannot blame McGill University, or Quebecers in the English-speaking minority, if we fail to maintain and revive the common pride of belonging to an inclusive language and culture. General statements on French, devoted to the link between language and culture, would not be out of place in the best wishes for 2024.