Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
The Legault government’s Bill 96 is currently at the detailed study stage in a parliamentary committee. Unfortunately, this project does not present a strong measure that would contribute to substantially changing the linguistic dynamics of Quebec. The extension of Bill 101 to the college level is a key measure that many demographers and experts have been calling for for a long time, but which unfortunately still does not appear in the bill.
The debates that preceded the adoption of Law 101 in 1977 are rich in lessons. Gaston Miron, poet and famous author of The raped man, was also a fervent activist for the French language. His observations on the arguments of the supporters of the status quo shine by their lucidity and reveal to us that, unfortunately, history repeats itself: the same sterile ideas that were current at the time are rehashed again today.
Miron speaks of “alienation” to describe the state of linguistic dispossession he experienced in the 1950s. -even speak, is at best “traduidu”, a neologism he coined to designate a literal translation from English to French.
“Slippery so wet”, “Automobiles with exact change only”, “Save money”: Miron’s polemical texts on the state of French in Quebec are teeming with examples of translation. However, Miron understands that this linguistic alienation comes from a “global situation”, generated by the domination of English over French, which goes well beyond the poor teaching of French at school. Its commitment will therefore consist in combating the institutional bilingualism that prevails in Quebec. He was part of all the demonstrations for French: in 1969, he took part in the McGill French operation and was one of the main speakers at the great demonstration against the ” bill 63” of the National Union, which enshrines the free choice of the language of instruction. He is also part of the demonstration against Robert Bourassa’s Law 178, which allows bilingual signage inside businesses.
The quality of French
Contrary to Miron, the opponents of a “coercive” measure such as the application of Bill 101 to colleges denounce the poverty of Quebecers’ French without ever questioning the dominant position that English exercises over French in a context of institutional bilingualism. Rather, they propose a few “incentive” measures, which depend on the goodwill of each of us, rather than acting politically. Their outcry about the quality of our national language ultimately constitutes “a diversionary operation”, to use Miron’s words, which inhibits any real political and collective action.
From 1960 to 1975, Quebec experienced what literary historians call “the joual dispute”. Quebec intellectuals were torn on this question: should we promote popular Quebec speech, by incorporating it for example into literary works, or on the contrary condemn it? Miron’s opinion on this controversy is original. In Decolonize the language, an essay published in 1973, he wrote: “The very notion of culture is assimilated to the fact of knowing the language of the other in order to access the dominant values; how many times have I heard this sentence: “He is educated (or cultured), he knows English.” In these conditions, we don’t give a damn about saying horse or joual… then the campaigns of good speaking and writing well, then “speaking well is respecting oneself”… what matters, what must be said, c ‘East horse. He also said with even more vigor: “While one is wondering if one should say joual or horse, it is the horse who gallops. »
In other words, while we beat ourselves up about the quality of our French, English progresses. In The native bilingual, Miron writes about the education he received: “At the time, the school was both champion of Good French Speaking and champion of bilingualism. A Francophone therefore understands very quickly that it is important to speak French well, but that it is even more important to know how to speak English!
Some 50 years later, the same logic is at work with Karl Blackburn, president of the Conseil du patronat du Québec. As the Legault government was about to introduce its Bill 96, it wrote that it was necessary to tackle the quality of the language of Quebeckers urgently rather than adopt “any law seeking to prohibit, block or restrict our access to other languages. […] Christian Corno, director general of Marianopolis College, opposes the application of Bill 101 to CEGEPs, believing that such a measure obscures more important issues, “like the quality of the French language”.
One cannot read these remarks without smiling; All of these opponents of the application of Bill 101 to CEGEP always take great care to affirm hand on heart that they are ardent Francophiles, while being very satisfied with the fact that French only counts for two skinny little courses in the curriculum of English CEGEP students!
Overall situation
However, it is illusory to want to improve the quality of French for young Quebecers without French being the language of higher education and work. Do we want to improve in French and go beyond the basic level that we acquired at the end of secondary school when we know that this language is downgraded? No. “In the status quo, writes Miron, we cannot act directly on language, we only appeal to motivations that only affect individuals. But, if we change the global situation which conditions the functioning of the language, the language will recover by itself. […]. Learning and practice will become deep motivations,” he writes in Decolonize the language.
The extension of Bill 101 to colleges was unfortunately described as “extremist” by Prime Minister Legault, who, during the presentation of Bill 96, strongly defended the right to study in English for Francophones and allophones. The opponents of this measure insist a lot on its “coercive” nature: according to them, it violates an individual right which, it must be emphasized, does not yet appear in any law. This rhetoric is used by the Fédération des cégeps which, through its president, Bernard Tremblay, believes that this “simplistic” measure is a “constraint” imposed on young adults who would have the right to choose their language of instruction.
However, this vision of things carefully hides the coercion that the government exerts on its own people when it asks them to overfund English CEGEPs out of their taxes — overfunding, because English CEGEPs have gone far beyond their primary mission, which is to serve the community. English-speaker. Of course, Bernard Tremblay believes that the CEGEPs are not responsible for the growing anglicization of Quebec, which is felt strongly in Montreal. The causes of the problem should rather be sought on the side of “the language of work”. This conveniently forgets that CEGEPs and the labor market are communicating vessels: students from English CEGEPs enroll massively in English-speaking universities and work overwhelmingly in English. By the same token, they exert coercive pressure on their co-workers who would persist in speaking French.
Places of refuge
In The native bilingual, an essay published in 1974, Miron recounts the disturbing experience he had when he was unemployed in the mid-1960s. An employment agent threatened to withdraw his benefits if he did not accept a job that required English: “Sometimes the system of bilingualism reveals its one-sided violence,” he wrote. After the interview, I was on a swing! No, but that’s not a form of coercion, is it? exerted by Anglophone socio-economic pressure? This coercion, our leaders find it normal […]. But when it comes to coercion to make French the official language, they don’t find it normal. »
We must face the facts, a significant number of our leaders have never embraced two of the main objectives of Bill 101: to make the French language the language of education and the labor market. They rather militate for an institutional bilingualism in which French is only one language out of two and, more and more often, the second.
Their discourse contributes to confining French to places that Miron calls “places of refuge”, places of “inside”, of “cultural withdrawal”. From this perspective, French is essentially the language of the family and, ultimately, that of primary and secondary school; the “outside”, higher education and the world of work, functions on the contrary in English. But the poet of The agonal life knew very well that a language which confines itself to places of refuge is a language which dies slowly. It was therefore important to him “to restore the unity of the inside and the outside, to make man adequate to his reality. Extending Bill 101 to CEGEPs is definitely an important step in achieving the goal that Miron had set for himself.
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