Whether we celebrate it or criticize it, language is an important vector of identity in Quebec. On the occasion of National Day, The duty asked linguists, translators, French teachers or other language specialists to reveal what they particularly like about Quebec French. A word, an expression, a characteristic: what makes our language alive, musical, dynamic, creative?
It is first of all the linguist Julie Auger who responds to our call, with a very small word which gives rhythm and knows how to turn the sentences into a question or an exclamation, depending on the context: the “you”. “Are you coming to see me?” » or “are you looking nice today!” » are Quebec constructions that make life easier, but also transport our history.
“I like it, on the one hand, because it’s something that we brought from France, first in the “ti” form, which has been transformed,” she says. This full professor at the University of Montreal explains that the “ti” comes from “t’il”, as in “will it come?” ”, but that for a long time the “l” was not pronounced. The “i” or “y” instead of the “il”, which Quebecers also often use, was therefore the “normal and historical way of saying things”.
A fact which is not without putting into perspective the perspective of those who call for “good French”, a rectitude that Mme Auger always takes care to surround “big quotation marks”. Towards the end of the 19th centurye century, linguists had also predicted that this interrogative form using the “ti” (and today the “tu” in Quebec) would take up all the space: “They noticed that it is a practical form, which allows in particular to maintain the order of subject, verb and object,” she notes.
The insertion of “you” as an interrogative or exclamatory form also follows “rules never taught in school” and which are nevertheless part of a more intuitive grammar.
A highway to the heart
It is precisely this grammar of speaking that Geneviève Breton is busy explaining and teaching online. Under the identity maprofdefrançais, she has made Quebec French her bread, her butter or her cup of tea, a hobby turned profession which has generated more than 4 million views on her YouTube channel, which has some 70,000 subscribers.
In her presentations, both educational and amusing, she “translates” from normative French to Quebec French words as simple as “cellular” (Quebec) rather than “portable” (in France), but also those of the colloquial register, which she is particularly fond of it. “The informal register is alive, it’s powerful. Popular words, they are connected to the nervous system, they “bypass” the brain,” she says.
For Julie Auger, the word “bullfrog” acts as a memory transmitter: “We don’t have many words of indigenous origin in Quebec French, and this one also has a more personal aspect. » It reminds him of the bullfrogs from his summers spent at Camp Minogami, in Mauricie.
Saying “enweye, come here” rather than “come on, come here” or “ch’pu capab” rather than “I can’t take it anymore” is extremely effective and more “linked to emotions”, believes Mme Breton. Breaking the rules offers more flexibility, which he likes. The expression “made you bloody in the face” or the words “the patched heart full of holes” from the group Offenbach, “it’s a freedom that joins poetry”, says Mme Breton.
Anchored in North American reality
Maryse Warda also sees the “punchy” aspect of speaking as an advantage in the plays that she translates from English to French. Her job as a translator and the Quebec accent she uses on the phone are a kind of “revenge” for the “9 and a half, almost 10” girl who arrived from Egypt.
“While it was the language that made me feel like a foreigner, I appropriated it enough to do my job today,” she says.
“I worked very hard to “get the accent”,” underlines the one who regularly has to justify the choice of translating the theater into Quebec French, even if our language “is designed for contemporary North American works”.
“Face to slap”, “eat a volley”, “there are slaps on the eye that are lost”: the language is very dynamic, sometimes insolent, without embellishment, few shortcuts.
In Quebec, “we use coronations as verbs, adjectives or adverbs,” recalls M.me Warda, which is “agile and flexible”, but also “fun” at the same time. ““Foufoune”, “gougoune”, “nounoune”, “baboune”, it’s not a language that takes itself too seriously, and it allows for these games of sound”.
Give yourself confidence to continue
Klervi Thienpont, who, like Mme Warda, interested in the language spoken in the theater, made our linguistic insecurity her subject of mastery, from which she also drew the show (Un)turn his tonguecurrently on tour.
Having a Belgian mother and a Quebecois father, she admits to having been “flattered” when she was younger when people told her that she “didn’t have an accent”. “It ‘kids’ me when it sounds too French. But being a trained actress, my ear was also formatted by normative French, so the Quebec accent sometimes clashes. »
By making herself her subject of reflection, she relates, like a good storyteller, that “it started to bother me that it bothered me”.
Why then love Quebec French? She reverses the question: “When we speak French that is not ours on stage, what does that say about us? How do we want to recognize ourselves? »
Playing — or living — in Quebecois is not “putting coronations everywhere”; it’s using local or colorful expressions. “It’s as if we think that we are always in the popular register, while the French are always in the neat register”; and these amalgams take time to deconstruct. “Language is so vast! It’s our way of naming the world. I am not for the impoverishment of the language! » exclaims Mme Thienpont.
Simply love him
“The worst detractors of Quebec French are Quebecers themselves! There are language columnists who have made it their business and have spent time denigrating the way we speak,” says Michel Usereau, who teaches French to newcomers to Montreal, with irony. For example, he is angry with some people for insisting on rejecting formulations like “stop smoking”: “We should say “stop smoking” instead, but everyone has already understood! »
The francization teacher works with immigrants who do not have the same preconceptions as French speakers about the language here. He speaks with energy of this student delighted to learn that the “a”s she heard everywhere are in fact “she”: “A is going to leave the house later and a is going to go. »
In his classes, where The duty has been invited several times over the last year, the French taught is anything but “academic and disembodied”.
“The worst threat to French is [si ceux qui l’apprennent] feel like they’re going to make a mistake every time they open their mouth. You can never feel comfortable in the language,” he explains.
There thus exists in French culture “a fantasy, a fetish of standardization at all costs and respect for a dogma”.
And Quebec French is a fracture, a breach in this vision, he says. Combined with the “dread of losing our French or seeing it “corrupt””, these elements push for innovation, notes linguist Julie Auger. It gives rise to “email”, to “chat”, but also to “platooirs”, these structures that we see appearing particularly in Montreal to stop and chat: “It is undoubtedly the most expensive word for me,” she concludes.