The Story of French (51 page)

The first, and perhaps biggest, myth is that francophones are the only people in the world trying to protect their language. Jacques Leclerc, a professor of linguistics at the Université Laval in Quebec City, has created a gigantic and authoritative website entitled
Aménagement linguistique dans le monde
(Language Planning throughout the World), which studies the policies of more than 150 countries and thousands of sub-jurisdictions. Whether the policies come from the top or the bottom, are implicit or explicit, targeted or general, most countries have them in some form. Most are indirect. Japan, for instance, requires all subsidized studies to be published in Japanese. The United States has no official federal policy, but states have countless indirect policies to reinforce English; no fewer than thirty-five American states have declared English their only official language, as protection against Spanish. If such measures are necessary when English is the world’s dominant language, it should come as no surprise that French speakers do the same. The big difference is that francophones are more explicit about it.

The second myth is that language protection is the job of the French Academy. The Academy is typically (and not incorrectly) considered an archaic institution that is trying to ward off modernity by shielding French from the world around it and retreating into a comfort zone of linguistic certainty. But the Academy’s role in language protection is greatly exaggerated. Its job—like that of all language academies—is to define the language, not to protect it. In some cases protection and definition go hand in hand, but even where the two objectives overlap, the French Academy plays a nominal role at best in language protection—though this doesn’t reduce its symbolic role in francophone culture, which is enormous.

In France, language protection is the job of a set of terminology commissions and the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (General Delegation to the French Language and the Languages of France), part of France’s ministry of culture. The commissions’ mandate is to monitor the use of foreign—mostly English—terminology in French industry and institutions and to propose French equivalents. Then the Delegation sends the commissions’ recommendations to the Academy, which more or less rubberstamps them. But the recommendations are not law; only civil servants are required to follow them, and only in relation to their jobs.

Most of the world’s languages have an academy, institute, committee, council or commission that serves as the ultimate authority on standards—English, which has no such body, is the exception. One of the purposes of our field trip to Israel was to visit the Hebrew Language Academy in Jerusalem, which provides the most impressive case of language engineering (along with Turkey). Hebrew had been a dead language until 1878, when Eliezer Ben Yehuda decided to resuscitate it. In 1881 Ben Yehuda moved to Palestine and founded the Hebrew Language Council, which gained official status after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and was renamed the Hebrew Language Academy in 1953.

The function of the Hebrew Language Academy makes it a hybrid between the French Academy and France’s terminology commissions. It works on standards of grammar and spelling, but it also seeks to replace foreign terms with Hebrew equivalents. As terminologist Barak Dan explained to us in his office on the campus of Hebrew University, the HLA has no more power than the French government does to impose Hebrew equivalents by force. Sometimes a word can take decades to come into use. In the 1960s, for instance, the HLA came up with a word for
cassette.
No one used it until the 1990s, when the media picked it up, after which it became so common that few people remember that it was an invention of the HLA. “But then, most Israelis don’t realize that they speak a language that was entirely created.” So, up to a point, language engineering works. The challenge to policy makers lies in finding under what conditions it will work.

Which leads to the next myth, that, for better or for worse, the French have the most aggressive language protection measures among francophones, if not in the world. In terms of cultural protection, that might be argued. But where actual language protection measures are concerned, Quebec has been leading the parade for at least half a century. Not only has Quebec become a model and inspiration throughout the francophonie, it is considered a model in France.

Why Quebec? As Jacques Leclerc explained to us, “The countries where language planning policies have succeeded best are those that deal with a specific problem with clear objectives.” In other words, language protection measures are strongest where the threat of assimilation is greatest. Few societies have managed to preserve their language against high odds of assimilation; Quebec, Catalonia and Israel are among the rare examples. The case of Quebec stands out for one reason: It was the first society to go head to head with English—and succeed. That’s one reason why francophones, including the French, follow Quebec’s lead.

Which leads to the biggest misconception of all: that language protection is essentially defensive, motivated by nostalgia, and aimed at blocking out change. Language protection has a bad reputation, perhaps because the Anglo-American press associates it with defensiveness and insecurity (especially when these measures are directed against English). Francophone measures to protect French are often held up as a sign of weakness, proof that, since French can’t survive without the help of laws, it is becoming irrelevant. However, Quebec’s language protection measures—and, increasingly, France’s—were designed not to shield French but to empower it and to make sure it could name, describe and participate in the modern world so that its speakers wouldn’t need to constantly turn to English. Better than anyone, Quebeckers know that if they don’t keep their language relevant, English will be waiting at the door. That’s why Quebec became a world leader in language protection.

Quebec’s leap into modernity and its language protection policies were parts of the same process.

During the first half of the twentieth century, all French Canadians came to understand how vulnerable their culture was to assimilation. In North America, all the aspects of modernity—machines, industry, science and technical expertise of all kinds—were expressed in English. After two centuries of isolation from France, French Canadians had no words for the new realities they were encountering, and were quickly becoming a mental colony of English-speaking North American society. One vestige of this period is Quebeckers’ habit of pronouncing foreign and specialized terms with an English accent, even if they are perfectly acceptable in French. That is changing, but Jean-Benoît remembers a time when his own father pronounced
à l’anglaise
words such as
cigar
and
guitare.
After the Second World War Quebeckers realized they needed to act decisively. The process began in 1959, when André Laurendeau, editor-in-chief of the Montreal daily
Le Devoir,
argued that Quebec needed more than newspaper columns on French to retain its language. Laurendeau called for the creation of an official institute of linguistics to improve the general quality of French in Quebec.

But it was one of Laurendeau’s readers, a modest cleric named Jean-Paul Desbiens, who picked up the idea and really forced the issue to the forefront of public consciousness. Writing under the pseudonym “Frère Untel” (Brother Anonymous), Desbiens published a dozen resounding letters in
Le Devoir
urging French Canadians to take control of their language. His first letter called for the creation of a provincial office of linguistics. “Language is public property,” he wrote, “and it is up to the State to protect it. The State protects the moose, the partridge and the trout…. Language is also a common good and the State should protect it just as strictly. An expression is well worth a moose, a word is worth a trout.”

Laurendeau’s and Desbiens’s ideas about language protection snowballed. In 1961 the newly elected Liberal government created the Régie de la langue française (French Language Commission). At first the Commission’s goal was almost pedagogical: to convince Quebeckers that they could live modern urban lives in French, a revolutionary idea at the time. The Commission sent linguists to France to research vocabulary there and bring back words to describe railways, planes, cars, textiles and power plants. Over the next fifteen years the Commission produced a number of lexicons of terminology for the automobile industry, the energy sector and sports.

The Commission published dozens of specialized booklets describing the proper French terms for different sectors and creating new French words where none existed. Some of its proposals, such as
hambourgeois
(hamburger),
gaminet
(T-shirt) and
oiselet
(birdie), never took root, but a golf green did become a
vert,
a hockey puck a
rondelle
or a
disque,
and a baseball pitcher a
lanceur.
Most Quebeckers don’t think twice about using these terms today, and Quebec constantly updates its vocabulary to keep up with the times. In Quebec some car mechanics still talk about
le bumpeur
and
le wipeur,
but most mechanics are now trained in schools that use French vocabulary:
pare-chocs
and
essuie-glace.

The reform movement in Quebec in the 1960s was powerful, and Quebeckers quickly realized that to save French in North America they needed powerful tools, not just new words. During the 1960s some highly publicized studies opened French Canadians’ eyes to the social and economic roots of assimilation. They realized that they were at the bottom of the wage ladder everywhere in Canada. Even in Quebec, francophones were better paid when they spoke English. In Canada linguistic assimilation was a one-way street, and Quebeckers knew they needed political tools to get the traffic rolling in both directions—or even just to hang on to their language.

At the same time, Quebeckers realized that immigration was threatening their language. Quebec’s view of immigration as a potential cultural threat has always been controversial in officially multicultural Canada, but its stance is not surprising. In the decades after the Second World War, more than seventy-five percent of immigrants to Quebec chose to school their children in English, even though more than eighty percent of Quebec’s population was French. By the 1960s it was plain that Quebec women were no longer willing to produce ten or twelve children as they once had, so allowing immigrants to continue assimilating to English threatened to definitively shift Quebec’s linguistic balance. In 1969 the Quebec government made a first timid attempt to pass a language law that would force immigrants to learn French and that promoted its use in the workplace. In 1974 the government passed another law: Law 22,
Loi sur la langue officielle,
a framework for a full-fledged language policy that used both carrots and sticks.

In 1976 the separatist Parti Québécois took power and the following year passed Law 101,
Charte de la langue française
(Charter of the French Language). French was made the official language of the province and declared the language of commerce, business, government and education. The law converted André Laurendeau’s Régie de la langue française into the Office québécois de la langue française and gave it a much broader mandate than simply keeping an eye on terminology. It included measures to
franciser
(Frenchify) business, and others that applied to the ministries that dealt with education, immigrants, and professionals such as doctors, lawyers and engineers. According to the new law, business signs in Quebec had to be in French and businesses with more than fifty employees had to obtain a certificate of
Frenchification
to prove that they were using French in daily communication. The law stipulated who could keep and who would lose the privilege of schooling their children in English-language public schools: Children already in the English system could continue, but all new immigrants had to send their children to French-language schools (unless they chose unsubsidized private schools, in which case the law did not apply). The government did allow English-speaking children to be schooled in English if their parents had been schooled in English in Quebec, and the privilege was later extended to the children of parents who had been schooled in English anywhere in Canada.

The law was not well accepted by Quebec’s English community, to put it mildly (some of them still refer to it as Bill 101, as if it had never become law), or by the federal government. The issue made waves across the country from the beginning, and the controversy lasted well into the 1990s. Many Canadians disagreed with the very principle of such a law, on the basis that language should be a matter of individual choice—ignoring the fact that late-nineteenth-century assimilation policies in Canada and the U.S. had been designed to protect English
against
French. Almost all the law’s articles were challenged in the courts. But most of the acrimony the charter caused in Quebec came not from the law itself, but from the way it was applied. The main bone of contention was the so-called Commission of Protection, whose agents were dubbed the “tongue troopers.” English-speaking Quebeckers considered their nitpicking over lettering on signs (the French letters were supposed to be three times larger than any English), or even business cards, as harassment—in some cases, with reason. Although the tongue troopers became notorious, their activity was only sporadic. The Liberal government abolished them in 1993; the Parti Québécois reinstated them in 1997, and then reabolished them in 2002. “At the moment, complaints against companies are dealt with by the advisor in charge of
Frenchification,
” Guy Dumas, deputy minister of the Secrétariat à la langue française, told us. Dumas oversees the application of the language policies in the various ministries. “This approach is much better accepted because we try to help businesses rather than sanction them.”