The Story of French (31 page)

On the whole, the federal government’s stance only reinforced the already strong link between French and the Catholic Church. The constitution guarantees confessional schools, which means that provinces can prohibit French schools, but not Catholic ones. By running their schools in French, the Catholic clergy became the saviours of the language. However, in New England and Louisiana the clergy decided it was more important to convert Protestants than to shelter the French-speaking community. They appointed English-speaking bishops and Irish priests, some of whom were starkly anti-French. This strategy was also used in every Canadian province west of Quebec. In Ontario, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Irish Catholics were adamant about keeping French Canadians “in their place,” and Bishop Michael Fallon, who led them, did all he could to bar bilingual Catholic schools. Franco-Ontarians, who form the largest group outside of Quebec, protested so vehemently that the clergy reversed their strategy. Wherever these practices were accepted without protest, French communities lost their parish and, with it, their most solid institution. In Louisiana the last Mass in French was sung in 1940.

Other powerful groups also worked against French. In the Canadian West, for instance, the Ku Klux Klan was openly anti-French and anti-Catholic and allied itself repeatedly with conservative parties to push for bans on teaching French. The Klan was also active against francophones in Maine.

Throughout the nineteenth century, French was still the dominant international language and the language of elites everywhere—even Roosevelt spoke French. But while this prestige helped bolster the place of French in Europe and even the teaching of French as a second language in America, it did nothing to help local francophone populations who were under siege by English-speaking elites. McGill University linguist Chantal Bouchard described this process in detail: English Canadians and Americans developed a clear distinction between Parisian French and French Canadian “patois.” The latter was totally discredited, barely considered a real language. Job offers for French teaching positions in American universities often stated, “French Canadians need not apply.”

One of the first reports of this linguistic prejudice dates back to the 1850s and comes from a Frenchman, Emmanuel Blain de Saint-Aubin. He had been hired to teach the children of a rich English-speaking Montreal family, the Monks. The mother had specifically hired a Frenchman to teach her kids so they would never speak “awful French-Canadian patois,” as she put it. Blain himself did not share her prejudice, but he did notice that the notion of a French-Canadian patois was firmly rooted among the Anglo-American elite.

At this point there were dialectal differences between the French spoken in Quebec and that spoken in France, but they weren’t as huge as the Anglo-American and Anglo-Canadian elites pretended. In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured Quebec for two weeks during his research for
Democracy in America,
had few comments to make about the language spoken there. One amusing anecdote he recounted described a time when he was travelling in the interior of Illinois guided by a Native man; he was surprised to hear the man speaking French with a Norman accent.

The term
patois
is far from neutral—and it’s an exaggeration. In contrast to the Caribbean colonies, where slaves developed a French-based Creole, the French spoken in North America never definitively broke away from the mainstream. Today French Canadians and Acadians speak the most distinctive variety of French in the French-speaking world, not just because of its accent, but also because of its great variety of idiosyncratic expressions. But the difference between Parisian and Canadian French is no greater than that between British English and the English spoken in Texas. There are dialectal differences, but never so extreme as to make them mutually unintelligible.

The “French-Canadian patois” label was in fact a political tool used to hasten the assimilation of francophones. It stripped French Canadians of the status and prestige they might have been able to take advantage of as speakers of the main international language of the time, and gutted francophones’ confidence in front of their English bosses (with no small thanks to the Catholic Church, urban francophones had become a proletariat, while the English-speaking elite owned most of the economy).

The same prejudice against Quebec French persists to this day. When we give lectures to teachers of French, Julie draws more praise for her French than Jean-Benoît does (she has a lighter Quebec accent and picked up an international style of French during our three years in France, which she uses on formal occasions and for public speaking). Sometimes the praise she receives is meant as encouragement, or admiration for the fact that she mastered French only as an adult. In almost every case her French is compared to that of Jean-Benoît, whom many teachers claim not to understand. Strangely, their inability to understand Jean-Benoît is never considered a handicap on their part—it just seems to go without saying that there is something wrong with Quebec French. The comment is absurd, not to mention puzzling, since Jean-Benoît has considerably better mastery of the language than does Julie. The reality is that, although they mean well, these teachers have absorbed a centuries-old prejudice that was designed to put an end to French Canadians.

Although there is no (legitimate) reason to consider Canadian French inferior, the patois label is rooted in real linguistic differences. Throughout the nineteenth century, dialectal differences between North American and European French increased. At the start of the twentieth century these were more marked than ever, to the point that even the French-Canadian elite became alarmed. The situation was, again, the result of French Canadians’ isolation. During the French regime in Canada, French Canadians were reputed to speak better French than most people from France (we explain this in chapter 4).

Dialectal differences had begun to develop as soon as the British took over. But at first it was not the Canadiens’ French that changed, it was the French spoken in France. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked repeatedly that New France was in fact an Old France—both in speech and in mores. Canadiens maintained the old aristocratic pronunciation of vowels in
oi—
for example,
moi
(me),
toi
(you),
poil
(hair)—as
mwé, twé
and
pwèl.
To this day some old-stock francophones in North America use pronunciations and vocabulary that derive from pre-Revolutionary France. The Canadiens retained the long vowel, which has all but disappeared in Paris. For words like
bête
(beast),
être
(to be) and
arrêter
(to stop), Quebeckers draw out the first vowel, whereas the French keep it short. Quebeckers have also maintained diphthongs, which evolved on their own; a verb such as
faire
(to do, to make) is pronounced
fair
in France, while Quebeckers introduce an extra vowel (almost an extra syllable) and pronounce it as
fah-air.
Quebeckers pronounce
pâte
(dough) as
pawt
rather than
pat,
and
fort
(strong) as
fawr
rather than
fore.

North American French has also maintained old consonantal sounds such as
dj, tch, dz
and
ts,
which have disappeared in standard French. A phrase like
tu dis
(you say) often comes out as
tsu dzis,
with a strong sibilance after the consonants. We noticed this feature in the French spoken in Guadeloupe as well, though Acadians have very little of it. Some of Jean-Benoît’s uncles, construction workers raised in the rural Beauce area of Quebec, speak a version of Quebec French that has held on to the
tch
and the
dj.
A verb like
tiens
(take) is pronounced
tchien
or even
quiens,
and a verb like
marier
(to wed) is pronounced
mardjer.
This type of pronunciation is still common in some parts of France, including central Auvergne. Quebeckers also roll the R as it used to be rolled in the
ancien regime.

Some features of French-Canadian word composition, grammar and syntax are also typically seventeenth century. Jean-Benoît’s grandfather used to say
formage
despite the French Academy’s decision that
fromage
was the proper term. In Acadia, French speakers often conjugate verbs in an archaic style, saying
je chantons
rather than
je chante.
French Canadians also commonly use expressions like
mais que
instead of
quand
(when), or
être après
instead of
être en train de
(to be in the process of doing something).

Over the centuries Acadians and French Canadians also developed their own regional vocabularies. Acadians tend to say
éparer
(to lay out, as laundry to dry) instead of
étendre,
while Quebeckers say
garrocher
(to throw) instead of
lancer.
Each also developed special terms to suit their circumstances, like the Quebec term
poudrerie
(powdered snow). Having missed the French Revolution, and being sheltered from France’s most extreme post-revolutionary anti-clericalism, French speakers in America maintained a lively tradition of religious profanity that originated in sometimes obscure religious tools or practices. This is one of the most original features of their language, and is instantly recognizable.

The characteristics described above are rarely all found in a single speaker, and the general manner of speaking in urban Quebec today is a lot more polished than it was fifty years ago. The norm being the norm, most educated French Canadians and Acadians can easily drop dialectal differences from their speech, which they tend to do in public speaking and in writing. (Though different in some ways, French writing in Canada is as normative as it is in France, and it conforms to the same norms.) How pronounced these features are in speaking often depends on class, education and whether the person has an urban or rural background. There is no real formula to describe how much or how little Quebecker speaks with the traditional Quebec accent—or accents, since there are many regional variations. Jean-Benoît is educated, urban and bourgeois, but speaks with a strong Quebec accent, no matter to whom he’s talking. But even if some versions of modern Quebec French are more polished, major dialectal variations still remain. They are particularly noticeable in the speech of children, who are not yet conscious of “correctness.”

Anglicisms are another feature of French in America. Historically, the French and Quebeckers have had very different relationships with English. While the French have to deal with the relatively recent influence of English as a global language, French Canadians and Acadians have been dealing with the imposing local presence of English for centuries. This has resulted in many borrowings, such as
poutine
, the name of a Quebec dish of French fries and cheddar cheese curds with brown gravy. An English listener is always surprised to learn that
poutine
is a corruption of the English
pudding,
itself a deformation of the French word
boudin
(a type of blood sausage).

But anglicisms play completely different roles in European and Quebec French. In France they convey a certain chic. In Quebec, anglicisms are a clear marker of class and education, and are usually considered a sign of ignorance. But even if French Canadians have borrowed many words from English, these have hardly affected the phonetics of the French they speak. Borrowings, in fact, rarely affect phonetics or grammar, the skeleton of any language.

However, borrowings became so intense at the start of the nineteenth century, particularly in the cities, that they affected the structure of the French spoken in America. In Louisiana, in New England and in some communities of the Canadian West, many native francophones lost their capacity to conjugate verbs. For example, an anglicism such as “
Il faut watcher son français,
” (you need to watch your French), inelegant as it is, is still structurally French. But “
Il faut watch son français
” (which we heard in Acadia) shows that the speaker hasn’t mastered the basic system of verb conjugation in French. Today, if you have to go through a Canadian call centre (outside of Quebec), you will regularly hear recorded messages saying they will “
répondre votre appel
” (a calque of “answer your call”) and “
accéder votre dossier
” (from the English “access your file”)—proper French calls for the preposition
à
after the verbs in this context.

Those kinds of anglicisms, which are extremely rare in Europe among native speakers of French, are heard much more frequently in North America, and even more so outside of Quebec. They are often a clear indicator of imminent assimilation. Even as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, French-Canadian newspapers were blowing the whistle on anglicisms and bad French, trying to stop the process of anglicization. Their efforts had varying degrees of success. In the twentieth century, Quebeckers would come to realize that these anglicisms were the result of a power relationship—English bosses often forced them to speak in English even among themselves (more on this in chapters 15 and 18).

But power relations do not explain everything: Other anglicisms show how technology plays a role in disseminating language. At the start of the nineteenth century, Canadian turbines and locomotives came not from France or Belgium but from England and the United States. The result: The vocabulary of construction workers and mechanics in Quebec is a study in anglicisms. Many Quebec mechanics speak of
le muffleur, le bumpeur
or
le wipeur,
whereas his French colleague says
silencieux, pare-chocs
and
essuie-glace.
The difference, of course, is that the instruction manual for a Ford, Chrysler or GM car used to come in English only, unlike those for Peugeots, Citroëns and Renaults. Technology-based anglicisms are one of the main forms of variances in North American French, and they show that technology is a vehicle of culture.