Can you lose your mother tongue? For many children of immigrant origin in Quebec, French takes over in their daily lives, to the point of making them passive bilinguals — that is to say, they can understand their parents’ language without be able to speak it. The duty presents the portraits of Quebecers who wanted to reclaim it. Today: the careers of Emmanuel De Medeiros, of Portuguese origin, and Hind Obad, of Moroccan origin.
Emmanuel is the “little youngest” of his family: he is the only one of his siblings of five to be born in Montreal, six years after his family emigrated from Portugal in 1986. While his brothers and sister learned “the hard way” in the reception class, French developed naturally for Emmanuel when he started school.
“But at home, we always spoke Portuguese. It was the easiest language for my parents, but also the language that my brothers and my sister were the least ashamed to speak,” says the man who is 30 today.
Although he communicated fluently in Portuguese during his childhood, Emmanuel felt a certain lag since, unlike the rest of his family, he essentially learned the language “by force of circumstance” at home. At the age of 15, he decided to join the Portuguese school to improve his skills.
“I had to start my journey in kindergarten. I was with children even though I was 15,” he recalls. Even if he rubbed shoulders with students much younger than him, Emmanuel was not the only one of his age to embark on this process. “I realized that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to improve in my language, even though it was my mother tongue. »
The three years of Portuguese school he did have finally paid off since today, Emmanuel affirms that his ability to read, write and even speak Portuguese has improved. His classes also allowed him to perfect his vocabulary – something he was looking to accomplish because of his Azorean accent.
Acquire a base
Born in Morocco, Hind Obad has spent most of her life in France. A mixture of Arabic and French was used at home, but her opportunities to speak Arabic were quite rare – it was only with her grandmother that she absolutely had to use it to make herself understood.
“When I was younger, when we went on vacation to Morocco, I developed a complex. When I tried to speak Moroccan, I spoke all crooked and my family laughed at me. It didn’t really make me want to try it, ”she laments.
Today, Hind still understands the Moroccan dialect, but “speaks it very badly, and with a rather humiliating ‘French accent'”.
“The humiliating and ironic side is that it is a language that I have heard a lot [durant mon enfance]. My first name and my last name have a very strong Arabic sound, but I am not able to pronounce [les mots] correctly,” adds the 32-year-old woman.
Last year, Hind enrolled in literary Arabic classes to “reclaim” her language. She learns the basics — including knowing the alphabet and starting to read a few words. But as the lessons are quite demanding, she ended them after six months of lessons, to her great regret.
“As I have already acquired a good base, I want to continue,” she says. In the meantime, she always keeps her little learning book Arabic in 5 minutes a day At her place.
A value to its identity
Emmanuel De Medeiros and Hind Obad are now in the same boat: the two young thirty-somethings understand their parents’ language well, but aspire to continue their efforts to improve it orally. “At the end of the day, I would like to be able to speak the language where my first name comes from,” says Hind.
For his part, Emmanuel is toying with the project of moving to Portugal with his wife soon. A step that will require some catching up, since the opportunities to practice Portuguese orally have become rare since the COVID-19 pandemic, a period during which several cultural activities ceased.
“It affects my ego because I had a lot of pride in identifying myself as Portuguese. Even though I was born here, I always wanted to get involved [dans la communauté] so that I am given value as a Portuguese, and not as the son of an immigrant,” he confides.
For both, continuing their efforts to maintain and improve their heritage language, even in adulthood, is essential to define themselves in their identity.