Listen closer. Quebec won’t be swallowing its tongue anytime soon. A collective of French-speaking linguists summons the prophets of doom to turn their tongues seven times in their mouths before crying out in the agony of French, both here and elsewhere.
French is fine, thank you. The title sums up in a jest the 65-page essay published by Gallimard and co-written by 18 specialists in “the language of Molière”. To reverse this vision that French is dying, start by forgetting this expression, claim the authors. The language of Molière is no longer the language of Molière since the death of Molière. The language of the playwright of the XVIIe century has naturally become, over time, the language of the Tremblays, Laferrières and Boobas.
“If we really read Molière in the original text, we would see that there are a lot of differences, words that have disappeared, really different grammatical structures, very different pronunciations. This expression, in my opinion, illustrates this fantasized language well”, explains in an interview the Quebecer Julie Auger, one of the members of the collective of “terrifying linguists”.
French has never been as alive as it is today, if you count the number of speakers in the world. Even in Quebec, the decreasing place of French as a language spoken at home does not reflect a decline, adds the professor of linguistics at the University of Montreal.
The proportion of Quebecers who speak French at home continues to decline, but not to the benefit of English
“Yes, the proportion of Quebecers who speak French at home continues to decline, but it’s not to the benefit of English. It is for the benefit of the languages that the new Quebecers have brought. For me, that is not a danger. »
Remember that 94% of Quebecers today can speak and understand French, regardless of their mother tongue…exactly the same proportion as at the beginning of the century.
The next generation of Francophones grows up mainly under the threat of picky people who demand perfect French from newcomers, underlines Julie Auger, while they give it a second wind. “These people could absolutely choose not to speak French and to speak only English, because when you speak English, you don’t get that kind of criticism. »
What about the “franglais”, vilified by scholars near us? “If we stick to the term ‘franglais’, it is much better suited to English than to French, retorts the collective. […] It is estimated that almost half the part of the English lexicon is borrowed from Old French or Norman. » And English « is doing well ».
French ? Yes sir !
Languages are not at war with each other, say experts, because “what one ‘gains’, the other does not lose”.
Who still uses the word “bâdrer”, borrowed from ” to bother in Quebec usage as a synonym for “disturb”? Who remembers the time when Anglicism ” some was used as an adverb to mean something big? The neologisms pass, the French remains.
And if an Anglicism ends up sticking to the palate of Quebecers, it does not replace the words that are already there. It provides a nuance of meaning. What would it be to speak from here without the subtleties of expressions like cheap Or lunch (which refers more to a meal that you drag with you than a meal at a given time)?
French, a flexible and supple language, has been “incorporating and digesting without problem” borrowings for centuries, recall the coalition linguists. The brand new additions of Haitian Creole and Arabic to discussions in Montreal are no exception.
The attentive ear will still hear some recent changes in the dialect here. We use more and more the infinitive of the verb in English where we used to conjugate it in French. In other words, Quebeckers are beginning to deal with that more than “dealing” with that.
This erosion of grammar – “the heart of a language”, according to Julie Auger – is already observed with us. Is it good or bad? The Quebec linguist does not say so. “Linguists are aware of this, that there are a lot of studies on this at the moment. We’re really in the middle of what could be a change, and so we’re listening, we’re trying to see what’s going on. »
French, a fertile language
French is fine, thank you is also aimed at big talkers, small doers who dream of reforming everyone’s language.
“Since the nineteenthe century, [l’Académie française] no longer follows the evolution of the language: it opposed the spelling reform planned in 1901 to support the access of all children to school, ”we read in the book. ” Her Dictionarythe only current official production, is barely in its ninth edition and is not at all up to date. […]. If the Academy isn’t up to date on vocabulary, it isn’t on grammar either. His only Grammar dates from 1932 and was so criticized that she did not dare to publish any more. »
Private dictionaries, reputed to be more flexible, struggle just as much to keep up with the endless changes of new vocabulary. The Little Larousse And Little Robert each list 60,000 words, while The Big Robert compiles 100,000 of them. We must turn to the participatory production of the Wiktionary to calculate the extent of French-speaking neologisms. Internet users have logged 400,000 entries.
And it continues to rise, thanks in part to the creative initiatives of local institutions.
Consider the OQLF’s Lexical Creativity Contest, which asks Quebec high school students to create words from scratch.
The winners of 2023:
- “spectatriche”, to replace the term “ stream sniping which consists of watching an opponent’s online broadcast during a video game competition to gain an advantage;
- “iconotypic”, to translate the English word “ on brand which qualifies what is typically representative of a brand or a public image;
- “ephrasing”, to name the act of removing a sentence from a text.
Do you speak French?
The other phantom threat that linguists denounce is the terrible Internet and its abstruse codes. Digital technology constitutes “a threat” for French, we hear in the echoes of the corridors of the National Assembly.
However, French sits in seventh place among the most used idioms in cyberspace.
And by digging through this huge body of raw data, we discover that the major trend is the transition to an increasingly normative French.
“The use of ‘to have’ instead of ‘to be’, for example ‘I fell’, is something that diminishes over time, indicates Julie Auger. Montreal French aligns more closely with standard French. On the other hand, an element which is non-standard, but which is growing, is the use of the interrogative “you”. »
Do we speak French well? Right or wrong isn’t the question, really. Good French is the one we speak. Point.