As we have seen, once again, in the text “Québécois French, no worse than any other”, published in The duty of last April 12, the endless debate on the quality of the language spoken in Quebec continues to come up against the same dialogue of the deaf. What follows is an attempt, in too few words, to see things a little more clearly.
Here are first examples of the same message expressed in six levels (or registers) of French spoken in Quebec: a) sustained level: If you persist on this path, Sir, you will do so at the risk of your life.b) standard: If you continue like this, dear sir, you risk losing your skin.c) familiar: You, my friend, if you continue like this, you will end up lifting your pawsd) very familiar: You, my boyfriend, if you continue like this, you will end up farting on the frete) popular: Toé, told you something right here, my man, you’re ready to pick you up at the cemeteryf) very popular (joual): Toé my tough guy, if you don’t slack a little, you’ll choke like a rat’s ass “.
As we can see, it is only at the “very familiar” and “popular” levels that we can find typically Quebecois pronunciation and lexicon traits (the syntax is common, at equivalent levels, to all varieties of spoken French). The problem is that we often, and quite unfairly, associate Quebec French with these levels alone, while qualifying it as “bad French” (as if other French speakers only expressed themselves in standard French and sustained, even in the most informal conversations).
However, only the “very popular” level (the famous “joual”) can objectively be described as unacceptable because it is linguistically and socially “stigmatized” as a sign of vulgarity and poor education. As for the popular level, it has a bad reputation in the eyes of many people because it represents a rather archaic language associated with the socio-culturally disadvantaged classes (but which we liked to hear, somewhat watered down, in many old soap operas like The beautiful stories of the countries above, The Plouffes… and, more recently, in the works of Michel Tremblay, who refuses, with good reason, that the language of his Sisters-in-law be taxed as joual).
As for all other levels, their social acceptability is closely linked to the situations in which they are used. For example, the sustained level statement (a) used by one of the boys in the locker room of his hockey team will be as out of place, in the eyes of the other players, as the very familiar example of level (d) used by a doctor in front of one of his patients whom he only sees in his office .
On this purely sociolinguistic level, we can therefore affirm that “the best language” is the one which goes unnoticed depending on the employment situation. And it is to make learners capable of such linguistic mobility between language levels that the school should endeavor by enriching the vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar of the learners’ spoken language, without harassing them. consistently in terms of their familiar or very familiar spoken language.
Linguistic acceptability, for its part, depends on the conformity of a usage to the grammatical rules in the broad sense (including pronunciation and lexical formation) of French. For example, the word “parking”, dear to the French, is orthographically (the core “ park “) and morphologically (the suffix ” -ing “) incompatible with French grammar, while Québécism “lousse” (from the English ” loose ”, meaning “loose”) is perfectly French in its pronunciation and spelling (and very useful, moreover, the word “loose” being associated in Quebec with its other meaning).
And as an Anglicism, the word “lousse” has the only problem of being of a “very familiar” level, while the word “parking” is not only “French from France”, which is quite an advantage ( !), but also at standard level (as recognized in major dictionaries). However, we must recognize, in practice, the usual precedence of the social criterion over the linguistic criterion, and the double standards that result from it. In Quebec, for example, a computer scientist can say “we have to test the bug” with impunity, but a mechanic cannot say “we have to check the plog” without raising the eyebrows of the discipline prefects.
All this being said, the traditional criterion used in French to judge the correctness of a statement, or even of a whole variety of language, such as Quebec French, too often remains the only “prescriptive” standard of “good usage”, traditionally associated, explicitly or not, with the famous “cultured French of Paris”. This is how according to the very influential Multidictionary by Marie-Éva de Villers (digital edition, 2022), we should always say “boiler” instead of “furnace”, “mothball” instead of “mothball”, “gloriette” instead of “gazebo”, “ tuxedo” instead of the anglicism (!) “tuxedo”, “cracker” instead of “biscuit soda” and “to speak indiscriminately” instead of the anglicism (!) “to speak through one’s hat” , which this dictionary does not deprive itself of in its list of more than 2000 “wrongful uses”, enough to intimidate, if not make insecure, a number of Quebecers and other Franco-Canadians and make English considerably less suffocating in their eyes. .