When people ask me what my origins are, it’s mainly because I “look” Italian, or rather, I resemble quite faithfully the idea that people have of the Italian look. Indeed, my father is Italian and my mother is Acadian.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
They then ask me if I speak Italian. And this is where I feel embarrassed. Yes, I speak Italian, but only a little and only because I took the trouble to learn it at university.
My father never spoke Italian because his parents always spoke to him in English. My grandparents, on the other hand, spoke Italian, but only with their parents — the first in our family to come directly from the old country — who spoke a dialect of southern Italy.
It was my great-grandparents who encouraged their children to favor English, the accepted and acceptable language of the time in the small lumber town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Three generations later, it takes more than a little effort to speak the language of my ancestors.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR
Joseph Scarfone, grandfather of author Olivia Collette, and his siblings. This is the first generation of the Scarfone family born in Canada.
That’s why I’m a foreigner in Italy. It’s cool to find myself among people who share my story, but I almost wish I could tell them that I’m anything but Italian. Because the moment I open my mouth, I have the accent of an American who doesn’t know how to roll her R’s or where to put the accent in certain simple words. I read Italian well and my comprehension is quite strong, but when I speak I have a childish vocabulary because I lack practice.
Admittedly, there are a lot of Italians in Montreal, but they rarely speak to me in Italian because just like my family, when they arrived here, they were discouraged and a few generations later, it was English or French that dominated.
Many of us have lost this connection with our history, our culture, our families. But the thing is, when you come to a country where the official language doesn’t match your mother tongue, you just can’t give the kids the best chance without sacrificing the heritage language.
It is a difficult choice that every immigrant family knows intimately and this choice is made before setting foot on the new land.
In the house where my grandmother grew up, the children did not speak English with their parents. But my grandmother and her siblings spoke English among themselves, and English quickly became everyone’s dominant language. It is in English that they learned to make jokes, to communicate complex ideas, to evacuate their emotions. It was in English that they deciphered the world for the children they in turn raised. It was in English that their grandchildren learned the story of their Italian origins.
These days, the CAQ is trying to sow controversy over the fact that fewer people speak French at home in Quebec.1 But the headline of this statistic greatly distorted the context. These are largely homes where newcomers and their families reside, and where parents may not be able to speak French fluently within six months.
However, these parents will insist that their children be enrolled in French schools and will encourage their children to use French as much as possible. These children may even serve as translators for their parents, because the survival of an immigrant family depends on the rapid and effective assimilation of young people.
These young people will be able to speak the language of their ancestors at home and French everywhere else, but it may very well not be passed on to the next generation. Thus, a single allophone household will give rise to two, perhaps three francophone households.
Note that it is not Bill 96 that will ensure that allophone households lose this link with their mother tongues in one or two generations. The immigrant reality has been doing this on its own for centuries.
1. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1780961/declin-francais-quebec-etudes-oqlf