Canadian and foreign researchers publish each year in Canadian scientific journals managed by a federal agency, the NRC Research Press, “NRC” referring to the National Research Council. Founded in 1916, the National Research Council Canada is a government organization that is Canada’s primary research and development agency.
These quality journals are officially bilingual, which means that researchers can publish articles written in French. For the benefit of readers of Dutyperhaps unfamiliar with peer-reviewed scientific articles (of specialists in the field of research), each article accepted for publication by the editor-in-chief must include a summary of the research of a few hundred words.
In Canadian journals, each article normally includes a abstract (written in English) and a summary (written in French), a good practice for disseminating scientific information to the international community, in both official languages of Canada. But now, as everything is changing rapidly in Canada on the linguistic level, in particular the increasingly precarious status of our language, Canadian scientific journals have undertaken this year, in 2023, an astonishing, certainly regrettable shift, by eliminating the abstract in French of each article.
This observation comes as Radio-Canada published on Wednesday an analysis of grant applications for the past 30 years showing that French-speaking researchers have fewer resources, fewer projects accepted and fewer grants than their English-speaking colleagues.
I checked in at least 10 scientific journals published by the NRC, and the French summary is well and truly gone, only theabstract being published. However, the abstract can be published at the “express” request of the researcher, as I recently did in an article to appear in a Canadian sibling journal.
Setbacks
Until December 2022, each journal published by the NRC translated into French theabstract of each of the items. It is clear that all the journals simultaneously faced the challenge of translating the majority of articles published annually into French, given the small number of articles written in French (less than 5% of all articles). Is it a lack of budget devoted to the translation of abstracts who afflicts the management of our journals? According to the editor of one of our major journals, the main problem is the lack of financial support from the federal government for scientific journals in Canada.
The marked reduction in the use of the French language in Canadian journals is not limited to the exclusion of the abstract, because the Web site of each journal is now unilingual English, as if French-speaking researchers, from Quebec, Canada or elsewhere in the world, no longer needed information about the journal or instructions to authors in their own language.
This astonishing situation is therefore not only the result of a lack of budget, but of an unspeakable desire to eliminate French from the media and scientific space of the country. This is a concrete sign of the gradual decline of French, but also, it must be emphasized, of a loss of cultural diversity in the country. Another decline in our founding language of the country, but also, it must be emphasized, an increase in the cultural deficit of English Canada.