This is not the first time that I have read from the pen of the writer Marco Micone (“Linguistic ‘racism'”, The duty from November 24, 2022) that it “would be a shame if the ‘thieves of jobs” of the post-war period are now becoming “language thieves”. I remember very well the time before the Quiet Revolution when some adults around me saw in our immigrants from Italy, Greece or Poland “thieves of jobs » that unemployed French-speaking Quebecers could have occupied. “Well-ordered charity begins with oneself”, they said then.
Two decades later, what I have retained from the linguistic debate of the 1970s around laws 22 (1974) and 101 (1976) is an invitation to immigrants to appropriate the language of the majority, French, rather than opting for English. Remember that we wanted to make Quebec a society “as French as Ontario was an English society”. By forcing the children of immigrants to do their primary and secondary schooling in the same schools as the children of the native population of Quebec, the French-speaking majority meant to the immigrants of the time – as to those of today moreover -, that they should learn French and use it.
Thus, the governmental will that underpinned the language laws of the 1970s was at the antipodes of “language theft”. It was clearly an unequivocal invitation to appropriate the language of the majority in order to promote living together in French in Quebec. It should be understood here that the laws 22 and 101 wanted to put an end to the French-language-vernacular-reserved-to-only-francophones-known-as-of-strain. I hoped it was once and for all. Half a century later, this is not yet the case.
Economists have demonstrated that “the classic analysis of supply and demand [peut aider à] understand the impact of policies […] linguistics […] on the use of French in Quebec and on the value of this language” (François Vaillancourt, in Annaeconomic analysis of language policies in Quebec: 40 years of Bill 101). Unlike common consumer goods, whose prices increase with scarcity, in the case of a communication network, the opposite is happening. Indeed, the larger the network, the more it is in everyone’s interest to access it. Seen from this perspective, the very idea of “language theft” becomes obsolete.
There is therefore no parallel to be drawn between the “thieves of jobs of yesteryear and the so-called “language thieves” who have been at work in Quebec for half a century.
Alas, there is more. To make matters worse, Mr. Micone misread an article by Mario Beaulieu, Bloc Québécois MP in Ottawa, an article that prompted his last public intervention in The duty. Indeed, nowhere in this text which appeared in The duty of November 17 there is no question of “French mother tongue”. However, among the 11 other co-signatories of the Bloc member’s article, I recognize two Anglo-Ontarians who have become eminent Franco-Quebecers. It’s a good bet that they would not have supported this article if Mr. Beaulieu had limited the French fact to Quebec and only to people for whom it was the first language learned in childhood.
When Mr. Beaulieu states that “a study by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) [prévoit] a collapse in the weight of Francophones in Quebec, from 81.6% in 2011 to 73.6% in 2036”, for a loss of 8 points in 25 years, he refers to the language spoken most often at home. The proof of this can be found in the work cited, Projection scenarios of certain linguistic characteristics of the Quebec population (2011-2036). If he had been interested in the French mother tongue, the same source shows that the collapse would have been 10 points, or from 78.9% to 68.9%.