How far will YOU go to save your language?

by ·0 Comments
Israel
Latest posts by Israel (see all)

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/RhapsodyinLingo/ 🧠 You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription 💰

Support the channel and my journey!

Get $10 for a language lesson on italki

Get 4 free months on NordVPN’s 2-year plan and stay protected on any WiFi network!

Best way to learn languages with TV!

Shout-out to Octo and Kamil Kajmowski for your support!

I’m standing outside Quebec’s language poliiii… Editor, can you put big quotes on that please?
Erm, sure thing. Just a sec.
Thank you. I’m outside Quebec’s language police. It’s a touchy name that is sometimes tongue in cheek, but other times can provoke debates and quarrels, which can then get blown out of proportion, get reported on, and thus solidifying the name. But I think the sheer ridiculousness of the name gives us valuable insight into the interestingly complex relationship between the English and French languages in this part of Canada. We’ll talk more about those guys later, but it’s deep winter here and there’s a snowstorm going on. So let’s go inside, eh?
That was the Office Québécois de la Langue Française, an institution dedicated to the preservation of French in Québec, through various policies and guidelines, some stricter than the others. But I’m not here to talk about the importance of preserving a language. Most people have already made up their minds about the value of language. No, this is not your classic language preservation or revitalisation story. It’s more nuanced than that, because this language has a unique position beyond simply a majority or a minority. So today I want to find out what it means to protect your language, what is being protected, and what the endgame is. Later in this video I’ll also speak to friends of mine who live here. In Québec French, of course, or I’ll try, after having spent the last video learning a bit of it. So welcome to Rhapsody in Lingo, my name is Israel, and how far will you go to save your language?
But first, some say that this sense of threat is overblown. After all, French is the majority
language here, especially outside of Greater Montreal, and by a big margin as well. Indeed, what struck me upon arrival was how incredibly, purely French everything just appeared. Signs, public transport announcements, ads, store names. It’s Frencher than France. It’s honestly surreal. But it’s never as black and white as it seems. So what are we saving here? What is Québec French?
The French language came to Canada with, évidemment, the French, in the 17th century. Since then, due to the unfortunate circumstances of the time, aka “having no internet”, it’s developed in parallel with French-French, usually known as “Metropolitan French”. When New France was absorbed into British territories, Québec French started coexisting with English until today. That long history of coexistence also resulted in Anglicisms that differ from Metropolitan French. While France mainly uses English words for modern, newfangled things, Quebec French has slowly and continuously accepted words from English over centuries. Ironically, unlike France, it rejects more modern English words in the name of preserving the language. Another thing that’s unique about Canadian French, of course, is the pronunciation. If you’ve seen my last video, where I attempted to learn the dialect (press like for the effort), you can see how lots of vowels and some consonants have shifted in different directions between the two countries. In many ways, Quebec French is more conservative, retaining not only more separate phonemes, but also diphthongs like eu, ai, which in France have disappeared everywhere except the infamous spelling.
What fascinates me about Quebec French is that it’s not really like any other minority language that you might know of. In fact, it’s not really one at all, at least not here. Because it is in a unique position where it is both a majority and a minority language. It is the majority in a province of a country where it is vastly outnumbered. So even though French has been the language of most people here ever since Europeans settled (well, First Nations languages are a completely different topic), I would so call it a minoritised language because it is precisely viewing it against the backdrop of Canada that turns it into a minority. And it is also this precarious position that makes it so contentious.
Personally, I find this position interesting because it reminds me a lot of my mother tongue Cantonese, which is the language of around 90% of people in Hong Kong. And yet it is constantly viewed against the backdrop of China and the Sinitic language family. This leads to the bizarre situation where you have to justify speaking your own majority language. But there is a big difference here. Cantonese is only the majority language in a relatively small region plus pockets of communities abroad. But taken as a whole, French is a very healthy language. So when we talk about this linguistic struggle, it’s more complex than just English versus French. There’s also the question of what French. Let me explain.
There are three levels to this. First, French. French is a strong language. In fact, one of the strongest in the world, thanks to the efforts of (ahem) empire. Second, Quebec French, which is kind of a catch-all term for all the varieties of French used here, including standard Canadian French, which is taught and studied here and is not that different from Metropolitan French. On the last level, there are various colloquial varieties commonly known as “joual” with vastly different accents and vocabularies. So they understand international French pretty well, but not the other way around. Indeed, we’re talking about diglossia here.
Quebec French exists on this spectrum between formal and informal, where, conventionally anyway, grammar and words and pronunciations from France are considered better. Public transportation announcements, for example, sounded much more French to me than people chatting. Until relatively recently, they had an internalised sense of inferiority that caused them to feel uneasy about certain things they say, and to switch fluidly between language varieties. French from France was often perceived to be more expressive and logical at the same time, even if people are actually better at expressing themselves in their native dialect. It’s like when Cantonese speakers constrain their vocabulary in order to use Standard Chinese and sound formal.
When Michel Tremblay’s play Les Belles-Sœurs came out in 1965 (1965 again?), it was championed as one of the first works in the colloquial Quebec French language, or joual . Since then it’s also been translated into Scots, which undergoes very similar stigma in Scotland. So in a sense, Quebec French is in a weak position not only with respect to English, but also the wider French language.
I’m in Plateau-Mont-Royal, also known as Little France within Montreal. The nickname doesn’t just come from the concentration of Francophones in this area, no, it’s actual French people. Since the 80s, this area has been so heavily gentrified that now you can walk down the street, hear loads of French, but without a lick of Quebec accent. So there’s nothing really inherent that makes French a minority language. In many ways it’s actually really dominant. So in order to say that French is safe in Quebec, do you have to keep speaking it in the same unique local way as you do now? What if it morphed in the future to include more English influence, or what if it only kept the formal register of French? Would that be considered a success or a failure?
One clearer way to determine a language’s health is to look at whether it is the community language, aka when you go to a shop, which language you can default to, when you go to social events, how likely you are to be speaking either language.
During my brief stay here, everyone has naturally spoken to me, an obvious tourist, in French, regardless of ethnicity and class. So it’s clearly THE community language here. It’s not like I have to ask them to speak it to me. (Someone just gave me my mic that I dropped and they spoke to me in French. It’s so natural.) But then it could also depend on which community we’re talking about, because here, the linguistic communities can be remarkably segregated.
The question of who’s a Francophone and who’s an Anglophone has such prominence in Canadian society that it shapes not only culture and everyday life, but also its politics. While some may say language is merely a means of communication, it’s so central to our core identities that the very same cultural divide exists in many bilingual societies.
Greater Montreal is by far the most bilingual part of Quebec, as in more people use English
as their day-to-day language, around 15%. This can manifest geographically, where one area is predominantly Anglophone or Francophone. Here in Westmount, for example, English influence is so dominant that they actually managed to get exemptions from the “language police” policies. There are also more institutions in Montreal, whether educational or commercial, that use more English. That’s why around 80% of Anglophones in Quebec live in this region.
Quebec City, on the other hand, consists of more than 90% Francophones, whereas Anglophones make up less than 2%, which is like a usual immigrant language. Across Quebec, the ratio is somewhere in between, around 75% to 8%. This is partly due to the Anglophones emigrating in the latter half of the last century, when the Francophone Quebec identity was strengthening.
So it all seems very healthy and strong. So where is this sense of being threatened coming from? Is it even real?
It’s not cut and dry. Sometimes the threat is subjective. Personally, I feel like a language is threatened when its usage often has to be justified. Why are you speaking this language? Why not speak X language instead?
Of course, that’s only in Quebec, and it is still part of Canada after all, at least as we speak, and it is the only one of the ten provinces to have a majority Francophone population. Which means that, for one, it is the only region to have such a strong justification to prioritise French, whether through promotion or enforcing. Besides, we have to take into account not just the local communities, but also wider communities, because it is impossible to cut off Quebec’s culture and lifestyle from its closest neighbours. To the south, it’s the United States. To the east and west, it’s Anglophone Canada. Its major cities lie along the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, with many, many connections to the culturally and economically significant regions of Toronto and the capital. Tourists mainly come from Anglophone regions, like I did. When we look at this bigger picture, whenever the majority Anglophone population of Canada comes to visit and do business, French turns from a majority language once again to a minority language. It’s always about the context.
Both Francophone and Anglophone communities have existed in Quebec for a long time. In fact, a number of Anglophones left Quebec over the past decades, so if anything, the threat to French as THE community language should have lessened. But there is one more community which is often overlooked, which can make or break this preservation movement.
In the grand calculus of a language’s survival and health, migration plays a huge but often overlooked role. Because people naturally migrate, whether to different countries or different parts of a country. You can’t just create a generation of native speakers and lock them there forever.
When we look at both Wales and Hong Kong, for example, arguably the greatest threat facing the languages right now is migration.Speakers of the languages moving out of their communities to cities, in the case of Welsh, and foreign countries, in the case of Cantonese, where they have less opportunities to speak it, and non-speakers from outside these communities moving in. The result of both scenarios is speakers coming into contact with non-speakers, at which point everyone resorts to the path of least resistance, the lingua franca.
Similarly, right now in Canada as a whole, and also in parts of Quebec, the default language for allophones, aka newcomers who speak neither English nor French, to learn and to use is English, which makes sense, because language learning IS hard. And if you’re an immigrant, which is already a socioeconomically weak position, you want to minimise the efforts and time costs. So not only are you not incentivised to learn both languages, but if you had to pick one, you would want to pick the one that grants access to not only most of Canada, but also a large part of the world. And that’s why English, despite being a minority native language in Montreal, has a strong power to assimilate new communities and become a common language, because of its global dominance. For a fairly long time, there was a strongly held belief that immigrants drown out the French language, either based on the assumption that French will automatically lose the tug of war, or perhaps an unconscious reluctance to accept newcomers into the community.
But there is no inherent reason why that has to be the case. I’ve been told by many comments that in places like Caernarfon, where Welsh is the shared community language, it’s not an odd sight to see someone like me speaking Welsh. Compare that to Hong Kong, where ethnic minorities have lived for generations, and many have learned the local language, some even as their first and only language. Yet, whenever one of them shows up on TV or on YouTube speaking Cantonese, they get loads of reactions that incessantly highlight the simple fact that they are speaking their mother tongue. Because deep down, we’ve yet to accept that as a normal occurrence. Deep down, we’re still a bit uneasy seeing that.
A healthy language isn’t one that relies on reproduction, it’s one that can be shared across groups and communities. In today’s globalised world, where migration is frequent, that is the winning scenario of this fight for language preservation. In other words, if you can somehow create an incentive large enough to overcome the initial barrier of learning French, larger than the incentive to learn English, such that these newcomers, be they migrants from other communities or foreign immigrants, are inclined to learn and use the local language, you go a long way towards winning the metaphorical war.
The other option is to make it happen by funneling new arrivals, especially children, into a French-speaking environment. In 1977, the Charter of the French Language, also known as Bill 101, was passed by the National Assembly of Quebec. One of the many things it did was to mandate that virtually all children, including those of immigrants, go to French schools. This was actually a novel idea at the time, because French used to be seen as a pretty exclusive thing. French schools were closely tied to the Catholic Church, so non-Catholics by default went to English schools. Alternatively, French was seen as an ethnic language, whereas English was sort of the common language. So it was a fundamental paradigm shift to abandon this exclusivity, which was obviously losing them the linguistic tug of war.
After the biggest hurdle towards assimilating allophones was removed, over the first three decades of the policy, around 100,000 so-called “children of Bill 101” had adopted French as their primary language of communication. For comparison, in 1971, 71% of allophone immigrants assimilated to English, whereas in 2001 it had dropped to 49, even though it’s worth noting that it’s still higher than the actual percentage of English speakers in Quebec. And by 2011, well over half of recent immigrants spoke French as their first official language.
And yet, the worry remains. School education only gives you a foundation in the language, and as we see in Wales, doesn’t necessarily guarantee its continued use. People were concerned that the incentives wouldn’t be strong enough to encourage and sustain this precarious French-speaking environment against the global popularity of English. Which brings us back to…
The language police. Bill 101 didn’t only seek to enact large-scale structural changes like what languages the children of immigrants speak. No, no, no, no, no. The reason they got this nickname is because of all the micromanaging that they apparently do. On top of declaring French the sole official language of the province, the bill guarantees that you have the right to access service in French across most public and private sectors. And yeah, that includes lots of detailed regulations.
Menus in French, software in French, signs and posters must at least have French, and if there is another language, French must be more prominent. That’s why we have things like KFC in French, and ARRÊT signs, even though France itself uses STOP. There have been cases where they’re said to go too far, such as trying to stop menus saying “pasta” in Italian. In 2022, Bill 96 was adopted, expanding these policies to cover more businesses, more signs, bigger French on signs, and the public sector WILL speak to you in French after you’ve lived there for six months.
All of this aims to create an environment where it’s most natural to just use French. You sort of just ease into it. Like me, when I’m reading a French menu anyway, it just makes most sense to just order in French as well. The result is that outside of Montreal, English has become too small to support educational and health institutions, the reverse of other provinces. And in the younger generation, the monolingual Anglophone population is on the decline.
But the decline of a language is not just about sheer numbers, it’s also about cultural prominence. And indisputably, English is gaining ground in the wider world, and as a result also, in local spaces, especially through the internet. And like depicted in these statues, the two are locked in a constant fight of statuses in the community’s shared consciousness. And no matter how real that decline or threat is, to a certain extent, it’s the perception of threat that makes it a little bit more real. Time and time again across the world, people have stopped passing down their languages because they perceive that they are becoming irrelevant or becoming a hindrance. Even in my native Hong Kong, where Cantonese is flourishing, this sense of insignificance or inferiority has led to so many parents actively giving up their own native tongue.
This once again asks the question, how far? How far is far enough? How far is too far?
Many have said it’s already too far. The English speaking minority IS native to Quebec, at least as much as the French majority is, and they have started to feel like they’re being coerced to give up their own minority language. So all these incentives that are meant to make French more attractive, how strong does the incentive get before it becomes coercion, or even punishment?
But the thing is, this is not just a tug of war between two local communities, but rather between one community and the global dominance of English. The harsh reality is, if one person speaks both languages equally well, the cultural soft power of English will continuously be tempting them to use it more. That’s why English has such a strong influence in Montreal, despite being a pretty small minority language.
The only answer is cultural soft power and environment. A culture that makes people proud to participate in using the language. Perhaps even one that is exported, like English language media now is, or Japanese and Korean media, an environment that makes people comfortable and naturally enter that linguistic zone. That’s what we’re building towards. But it’s a chicken and egg problem. The healthier the language is, the easier it is for the culture to flourish. How do you tip the balance that way?
I’ve long been a strong proponent of preserving linguistic diversity, and yet Quebec has been such a nuanced case where it’s both the majority and a minority language, and in some people’s views, its preservation has gone so far as to threaten linguistic diversity. Writing this script has made me rethink ideas I had about efforts to protect my own native tongue. I once said: Shout it in people’s ears! Make them visible and audible! Piss off people if you have to. But when do you have to? In this case, it’s not really my place to draw conclusions. But if you ask me, it’s really hard to say that a place SHOULD be speaking this language or that language, not only because both of these languages here came from empires, but also because ultimately we all migrated from elsewhere. If you look at the history of languages, it’s just a tale of influences expanding and receding, stronger languages stamping out weaker ones. People just spoke whatever language worked for them and lived on. So does that mean that preserving or protecting your language is meaningless?
No. Because while the past has been written, the future has yet to come. Everyone speaking their mother tongue right now is playing a part in writing that future. The current era may come with new challenges in the form of digital globalisation, but also a newfound awareness towards language preservation and new opportunities to use your language even if you don’t know anyone in real life who speaks it.
As we see from stories like Wales, the gravitational pull of English in this day and age really does present the greatest threat towards linguistic diversity. A lot can be given up in the name of convenience. But similar to Wales and unlike Hong Kong, Quebec is in a relatively strong position to try and exert influence over the winds of change through policy and cultural soft power, especially compared to nearby dialects like Ontario French or Acadian French. But it’s now stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to strike a balance between negotiating a stronger position for the culture to thrive and imposing too many restrictions on people’s everyday lives.
As for where that balance is, I can’t say, because I don’t live here, I’m not from here. We don’t know how this language is going to change in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, whether it’s going to become more English, more French, or disappear, whether these assertive policies will continue to work or backfire. But what I can say is that I’m glad this linguistically unique part of North America exists for me to experience and to inspire me to think about how we might or might not go about saving our language, if we had the same political power.
As for the future of Quebecois, its destiny is in your hands.
I am in the… I am in the snow. I am like actually inside of the snow.
This video is based on articles and papers I’ve read on the subject, and it’s an incredibly nuanced topic that I can’t cover in one vlog. If you have corrections or local insight, please do let me know in the comments. And if you want to see my full interviews and discussions with my friends in two different kinds of French, consider becoming a channel member, and I’ll see you in the next one.