I like English. I received all my training in English, in New York, where I grew up. In addition to my duties at the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS), I am also adjunct professor at McGill. I like to read thrillers british.
However, when I leave my house or my office, it is French that I speak spontaneously when entering a business or another public place. It’s a choice. I have always seen it as my civic duty. When I arrived in Montreal, it would have been easier for me to use English. The presence of English in Montreal is not new. What has changed is the rise of English as an essential language.
English, which has become a basic subject
English is no longer a language like any other. Learning German, Spanish or any other language is always helpful. Language learning should be encouraged. However, English is no longer just a language. It has become an obligatory skill like math, the language of new technologies, the language of international trade, the normal second language of European youth… What Quebec parent today would not want their children to learn English?
The 2021 census tells us that 52% of Quebecers understand English (73% for the island of Montreal), figures on the rise since 2001 (for comparison, 11% of Ontarians understand French).
We should rejoice in this; we want – don’t we? – that our young people also appropriate this essential tool of the modern world: more than 90% of the Dutch, more than 70% of the Austrians and even more than 55% of the French understand English today according to various sources, figures everywhere in the rise. We can already see a future where English will be understood by the vast majority of Quebecers and probably by more than 90% of Montrealers. We’re no crazier than the Dutch.
The dilemma
Here we are today faced with an apparent contradiction: wanting to limit the use of a language whose learning we also want to encourage. Two consequences flow from this, the first bureaucratic, less serious, the second more serious. Asking companies, as Law 96 does, to justify knowledge of English as a hiring criterion has become absurd, a useless hassle. Find me a less demanding job where English is not an asset. Is there a journalist in The Press who doesn’t understand English? Let’s stop confusing working language and work tool. At INRS, French is the working language (language of assemblies, language between colleagues, etc.), but knowledge of English (language of major scientific journals) is an absolute requirement for professors and graduate students.
The rise of English as a working tool would not be a problem if French were really the common language. Even if all young Dutch people speak English, Dutch remains the language among Dutch people, used spontaneously in the public space. The Quebec (especially Montreal) difference is there.
We have a population whose first language is English and who have the right to use it. Any newcomer quickly sees that English is used everywhere. However, why, especially if he already has notions of English, learn French if everyone understands English, which in addition is the language of a good part of the population?
Of course, learning French, at least acquiring the basics, can be useful (compulsory for certain professions); but nothing will prevent our newcomer from adopting (or keeping) English as his main public language.
And finally, in a world where everyone (or almost) understands English, isn’t it natural that English should be, even more often than today, the language used between Francophones and Anglophones?
Reconciling “right” and “civic duty”
How then to make French the common language of Montrealers, spoken spontaneously among us, regardless of our origins? The response cannot be conceived without the support of the English-speaking community. I spoke of civic duty for good reason. As a minority community, the protection of language rights will necessarily remain a concern; it is not a question of denying them. However, is it utopian to envision a Montreal where our English-speaking fellow citizens now also see as their civic-duty to use French as a public language (I leave aside health services and other public services where the right to use English must remain protected)? It must start with school: an English-speaking system which now ensures that young people leaving secondary school are not only perfectly at ease in French, but perceive it as their language (along with English) as well have a duty to promote, starting with its use in the public space.
The initiative for such a change in perception (and discourse) must necessarily come from opinion leaders in the English-speaking community (I am thinking, for example, of the editorialists of the Montreal Gazette). Again, is it utopian to dream of the English-Quebec community as an ally now in the battle to make French the common language of Quebec?