In 2019, I moved to Spain for a year. I had every intention of improving my Spanish and reaching an advanced level. I saved up, took a gap year, packed my bags, and booked a one-way flight from Montreal to Madrid. I took every opportunity to improve myself; I lived in a flatshare where we only spoke Spanish, took 20 hours of lessons a week and avoided speaking English or French as much as possible.
I was fascinated by the fluency with which the Spaniards spoke. Jealous even. They didn’t have to think about the grammar rules that I reviewed every night, they had integrated them unconsciously from childhood. They had the genius of their language.
Which made me think about the genius of my own language, French. How lucky I was to be born in a French-speaking environment. French is an incredibly rich, beautiful and subtle language and I don’t have to think about its rules; they live in me, are part of me.
When I returned to Quebec a year later, I was struck by the poor treatment of our language, and by extension our ability to formulate clear and structured ideas. You have to believe that I had forgotten the “The guy I went with”, “It didn’t give him anything”, “The thing I was talking to you about”. Also forgotten was the fate reserved for French by too many people of my generation who no longer seem to be able to formulate a sentence without borrowing its syntax and vocabulary from English and who, what is more, seem proud of it.
Our accent is beautiful and we should celebrate it. But an accent does not make a language. If we want to build a society intellectually ready to face the challenges of tomorrow, we have the responsibility to maintain this system of communication which has been given to us and thanks to which we see and express the world which surrounds us in a rich and distinct way.
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