Like many people, I am appalled by the figures that announce the quiet decline of French in Quebec. Among the solutions proposed to not only enhance our language, but to reaffirm its status as the sole official language, one of them seems to me to have been forgotten: defending and illustrating the variety of Quebec French.
In his excellent book Where does the Quebec accent come from? And that of the Parisians?linguist Jean-Denis Gendron reports that the French language spoken in Quebec once aroused the praise of observers.
Your opinion
interests us.
Do you have an opinion to share? A text between 300 and 600 words that you would like to submit to us?
A devalued language
However, with the French Revolution of 1789 in particular, the standards changed and the varieties of French evolved differently, so that from 1830, European travellers, including the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, described the French of Quebecers – then French Canadians – deplorable.
There was certainly a change of discourse in the 1960s with the Quiet Revolution and the influence of linguistic variationist currents in the university environment which made it possible to restore Quebec French to its former glory, but it is clear that nearly 250 years later, Quebec French is still perceived as unsightly, which greatly undermines its attractiveness. Some will want to learn a devalued variety of language, perceived as a bastard version of French. No wonder immigrants are massively turning to English!
Linguistic insecurity
It is high time that specialists in the French language, like those who teach it, rid themselves once and for all of their reflexes which betray centuries of linguistic insecurity. Don’t get me wrong, what I’m saying is to promote the standard variety of Quebec French, which would consist, among other things, of leaving the innocent snowbanks alone, which have nothing of the tiny European snowdrifts or of being able to thread in peace his shoes without being hyper-corrected to replace this term with shoes.
Souliers has nothing pejorative or connoted. Could we also consult a dictionary without “Quebecism” (again, this term is widely controversial in linguistics) does not equal colloquial register? And again, I am not even going into the morpho-syntactic structures specific to our variety of language…
To defend Quebec French, it is not a question either of naively relativizing excessively the influences of English and other varieties of French by justifying an alleged natural evolution of languages. This “evolution” is far from escaping the power structures inherent in societies. It is completely justified to want to fight an evolution which betrays a latent socio-cultural domination. These are key social issues for Quebec.
Kim Samson, Lecturer in French didactics at Laval University, Quebec