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Language modifications to mirror its folks and its historical past. Therefore, there are little bits of English in our “parlure.” It’s a part of who we’re.
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After I was 15 and in Secondary 3, my French trainer in my very francophone non-public highschool in Ahuntsic-Cartierville made us learn Un Ange cornu avec des ailes de tôles and Les Belles-Soeurs, each Québécois classics from Michel Tremblay. For the category, it was a primary introduction to joual, the spoken Québécois present in his work.
Many years in the past, joual was thought-about an insult to the French language. It was the best way the working class spoke! It was ugly, riddled with anglicisms and sounded guttural (effectively, a minimum of in accordance with André Laurendeau, the famous journalist, writer, playwright, politician and nationalist activist and theorist of that period.)
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In school, we realized that Tremblay needed to point out the world how we, Québécois francophones, lived and sounded. He gave a voice to these deemed too unimportant to be heard. In distinction to Réjean Ducharme, whose L’Avalée des avalées was printed across the identical years, Tremblay used on a regular basis language to depict what Quebec was and nonetheless is.
I’ve at all times cherished Tremblay. To at the present time, I nonetheless can recite some components of the Ode au Bingo from Les Belles-Soeurs and joke about Les z’Europes when a pal talks an excessive amount of a couple of journey to any European nation.
As a result of my trainer, Madame Lamarche, taught us these books, I fell in love with French. Exhausting. I discover French, largely Québécois French, stunning. It’s vibrant and powerful, and it modifications to mirror its folks and its historical past. Therefore, there are little bits of English in our parlure. It’s a part of who we’re.
Final week, a video made the rounds during which Premier François Legault inadvertently used the phrase “cool” in remarks meant to vilify younger Quebecers’ use of English phrases whereas talking French. Although he laughed at himself, the harmless flub mirrored one thing larger: Our French is colored by English. That is neither dangerous nor good; it’s merely a indisputable fact that displays Quebec’s wealthy historical past. Language modifications and adapts to the present actuality of issues.
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As a francophone, I communicate a franglais very assumé. My companion is an anglo-Québécois Loyola Excessive College alumnus born in Florida to a Québécois mom and Finnish father. Our house is bilingual, shifting consistently between each official languages.
After I go to my mother-in-law, I communicate to her in French about my newest readings and change concepts about books we’d prefer to learn. My companion calls his maternal aunt “Matante.” My companion’s household is a real instance of our province’s pure laines: descendants of French colonizers and of the Irish and Italian diaspora (as analyzed by ancestry.com). They’re like most Québécois households I’ve recognized, a product of a number of cultures and languages.
Our political leaders’ obsession with attempting to guard Quebec’s French heritage by prohibiting or limiting the usage of English is, in my view, destined to fail. Proscribing folks’s entry to an English-speaking training or to anglo-Québécois tradition is doomed to push folks additional away from the French language. You don’t preserve a language alive by forcing folks to undertake it. The issue is deeper than this.
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After I learn Tremblay for the primary time, I understood Quebec. I understood the place I got here from and what I used to be part of. Right here it was in entrance of me how Québécois folks lived and spoke their language. It was vibrant and distinctive. It confirmed how they tailored their language to their actuality, precisely how it’s carried out at the moment.
Our present actuality is 2 communities lastly coming as one. Persevering with to feed the narrative of “les deux solitudes” is an excuse to not attempt to embrace our French Québécois language.
To guard a language, we have to be open to what it truly is. In any other case, French will disappear due to our flesh pressers’ obsession to maintain it immutable.
Yara El-Soueidi is a author and tradition columnist primarily based in Montreal.
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