Friday was the last day at Radio-Canada for Guy Bertrand, who is retiring after more than 33 years of service. Listeners know him for his columns on the subtleties of the French language. His role as first linguistic advisor also led him to establish the standards for how to express oneself on the airwaves. During his career, the language level within the public broadcaster will have evolved considerably to get closer to that spoken on a daily basis. Some will say that it has deteriorated, but certainly not Guy Bertrand, who takes great care to avoid sinking into catastrophism and nostalgia.
“A language that does not evolve is a language that ossifies and dies. The developments in French, whether we like them or not, allow the language to remain alive,” maintains the one who believes that it is normal for Radio-Canada to adapt to these changes so as not to not appear out of touch or, worse, elitist.
When Guy Bertrand was hired there in the early 1990s, the French spoken on the air was less sophisticated than the Canadian radio “perler” of Judith Jasmin and Michelle Tisseyre from the black and white era. But several headliners continued to express themselves in a more international French. This gap between the language level at Radio-Canada and that of the average listener has narrowed in recent years.
For Guy Bertrand, this is the normal course of things. But be careful not to fall into a familiar, even vulgar, register. “Radio-Canada must reflect the population, but at the same time, it must be a model,” he emphasizes. “It’s normal that we don’t speak quite the same French on the air as we speak when we’re with friends. It’s normal in life to make mistakes. I do it myself. But on the air, we must try as much as possible not to do so. You have to aim for a high level, without being elitist. You have to be friendly, without being familiar. And sometimes the line between the two is thin. »
English, what threat?
Within Radio-Canada, Guy Bertrand was a moral authority to delimit what was acceptable to say or not to say on the air. René Homier-Roy had friendly nicknamed him “the ayatollah of the language”. However, he was never one to issue fatwas. Value judgments, very little for him.
Certainly, Guy Bertrand advises against the use on air of calques from English, such as “saving money”, instead of the terms “economise” or “spare”. But he is not one of those who systematically disapproves of borrowings from English in everyday language.
“If we had spoken to a centenarian in 1900, he would have told us that the language had evolved very little since its birth. But since the end of the Second World War, the spoken language has changed significantly with globalization. And it accelerated with the arrival of the Internet and social networks, which introduced several new words, often in English. This is a new phenomenon. This is what concerns many people currently. But, from a linguistic point of view, there is nothing worrying about that,” he explains.
Shades of straightness
What worries him more is this tendency towards political correctness. And by this he is not referring to the replacement of certain terms by others. It does not offend him that today we say “small person” instead of “dwarf”, or “handicapped person” instead of “handicapped”. On the contrary, it is somewhat in the order of things, according to him. “The most important thing is respect. And when members of a given group say they wish to be described in a certain way rather than another, it is the least we can do to use the desired term in their presence,” the columnist reasons. .
By “political correctness”, Guy Bertrand is rather referring to the banning of certain words. A trend that he observes in the wake of the thorny debate around the use of the n-word. “It’s completely normal that we no longer say “Indians” when talking about Aboriginal people. This was factually incorrect. But if we talk about the discrimination that Indigenous people experienced, it’s normal that we say that they were called Indians. It’s important that we have access to these words. Not to be able to reuse them in everyday language, but to take stock of the discrimination they have experienced in history,” underlines the trained translator.
Another delicate subject: the non-gendered pronoun “iel”, which recently made its entry into The Robert. Trans and non-binary people are calling for it. But Guy Bertrand doubts that its use will become widespread. “We create new nouns, new adjectives, new verbs in French every day. But you will notice that there are never any new prepositions or new conjunctions. For pronouns, it’s the same thing. It’s part of the basis of the language. I have nothing against the fact that we create a pronoun to take into account a new reality. But introducing a new pronoun, when many confuse masculine and feminine, it’s very complicated,” estimates the man who has just celebrated his 70th birthday.
His voice will be missed by many listeners. The Société Radio-Canada indicated that he would be replaced in his role as linguistic advisor for journalists and presenters. On the other hand, no one will take over his column on ICI Première.