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.”
Law 101 provoked a lot of Quebec-bashing in both the Canadian and American media. American journalists thought that anglophone Quebeckers had lost their rights to an English-speaking lawyer and trials in English, and even to education and health services in English. The ideas were alarming, but mostly false. At the time of the law’s twentieth anniversary, in 1997, the government of Quebec wanted to respond to these misconceptions, so Guy Dumas organized four focus groups in Washington, New York City, Chicago and Atlanta. “We gave a questionnaire to a group of opinion makers and collected the answers, then used the opportunity to give them the right answers,” remembers Dumas, who is himself married to an Australian-born, Toronto-raised epidemiologist. “They believed that there were no English public schools in Quebec and that people had no right to speak in English at trials. Some even believed the basic principle of our law was that people were guilty until proven innocent!” Now, nearly thirty years later, the controversy in Canada over the law has waned. It still has its sharp critics, but the general principle is largely accepted. The Supreme Court of Canada is often called upon to rule on specific points of the law’s application, but it no longer demands “proof” of the need to protect the French language, a strong indication that the Supreme Court adheres to the basic principle and necessity of language protection in Quebec. At the same time, individual plaintiffs regularly challenge the validity of the law in the courts, and this keeps the Quebec government on its toes.
More important, time has shown that the language law is not only balanced, but also effective. French is now the predominant language of the province. Even in Montreal, where most of the anglophone community and most immigrants live, the situation is best described as one of linguistic peace. And while English remains a force to contend with, language assimilation is no longer a one-way street. Quebec’s anglophone community has in fact become much more bilingual than the francophone majority. Immigrants still resist the idea of learning French, but most have accepted the situation and are progressively assimilating to the francophone majority. The face of Montreal, which was English only forty years ago, is now predominantly French. The law does not affect trademarks, but many companies have chosen to modify their name in order to appeal to local customers. In Quebec, Kentucky Fried Chicken is known not as KFC, but as PFK (Poulet Frit Kentucky), even though in France it remains KFC. And software companies are managing to translate for the Quebec market.
At the turn of the millennium the Office québécois de la langue française refined its approach to its two basic missions of Frenchifying business and creating French terminology. A company seeking its certificate of francisation is evaluated on dozens of criteria, including how the company communicates with its employees and the public. Companies with more than a hundred employees must create a comité de francisation (Frenchification committee) composed of equal numbers of representatives of employees and executives. Eighty percent of Quebec companies with more than fifty employees are certified.
Contrary to a popular Canadian myth, the Quebec government doesn’t have much power to change signs that aren’t in French or to actually force Frenchification on large companies. The Office doesn’t try to convert businesses to French; it just makes sure that the employees’ right to work in French and the public’s right to communicate in French are respected. Another popular myth has it that the tongue troopers issue fines. In reality, companies that refuse to comply are taken to court. “Ninety percent of them seek an out-of-court settlement,” says Dumas. The government doesn’t have the power either to close companies or to remove products from shelves. “But those who refuse to comply with the law cannot get subsidies or do business with the government,” says Dumas.
On the other hand, as Guy Dumas explained to us, the Office realized over time that it could not let its guard down. “At the beginning we thought that the certificate of Frenchification was enough, but then we saw that, to make the measure effective, we had to ask companies to report every three years on their linguistic situation [another condition for obtaining the certificate].” Indeed, changes in ownership or even in personnel mean that the idea of using French has to be driven home again and again. Chrysler now produces manuals in French, but Chrysler’s latest Model 300 came out with a computer that displayed extremely faulty French, including “Bas Fluide de Rondelle” for “Low Washer Fluid” instead of “Bas Niveau de Lave-glace.”
The Office typically has other problems with smaller businesses. Although businesses with fewer than fifty employees aren’t required to have certificates of Frenchification, their signs must give precedence to French. Out of rebelliousness, or mere practicality, some Montreal merchants push the limits of acceptable French on their signs. We walk regularly in Montreal’s Mount Royal Park, and on our way there we pass a garage that was once called George General Auto Repair. To respect the language law, George just added a few letters to his sign by hand; it now reads, in less than passable French, “George Général d’Auto Réparation.”
Terminology is the field in which the Office québécois de la langue française really excels; even the French use it as a reference. There are many reasons for Quebec’s strong performance. One is size: the Office québécois de la langue française has 215 employees, sixty of whom are terminologists, whereas France’s equivalent, the DGLFLF, has about thirty employees and seven terminologists and depends largely on volunteers to report on terms in the workplace. More important, Quebec’s terminologists act quickly. Quebec decided long ago that concepts and inventions with English names had to be translated right away, and that catchy French substitutes had to be created before English terms caught on. Quebec’s Office monitors new technologies very carefully. This was how they created the famous courriel for e-mail, a contraction of courrier électronique, that also rhymes with another well accepted creation: logiciel (software). The same thinking was applied to junk mail, producing pourriel, which combines poubelle (garbage) and logiciel. Another example is clavardage (Internet chat), which combined clavier (keyboard) with bavardage (chat). The latest example of creativity involved the Internet term phishing, which they adapted as hameçonnage (from hameçon, hook). Quebec’s language commission doesn’t always come up with such great terms as courriel, pourriel, clavardage or hameçonner, but in the absence of a good alternative it rapidly Frenchifies English spellings, for example, turning blog into blogue. The suggestions don’t always fly, but many of their terms do take root.
Despite fears and accusations that the language law would isolate Quebec, the province has never been more open to outside influence and ideas than since it applied protective measures. Protection measures have never prevented ideas from circulating, but they circulate in French, and that was the point. “People will speak French if it is modern, if it is up to date,” says Dumas. Every year, the OQLF’s Grand dictionnaire terminologique (Large Dictionary of Terminology) receives fifty million requests to translate or verify words, half of which come from Europe. The French Academy’s website, in comparison, receives two million requests per year. Over the years Quebec’s terminologists have been so effective that they now export their know-how. Quebec was the inspiration and model for the language policy of the Catalan government in Barcelona. And the Brazilian language commission is beginning its work by examining the new ideas from Quebec, which it adapts to Portuguese when it sees fit.
We were surprised to discover that even the French look up to Quebeckers on the issue of terminology creation. This is all the more surprising because it was the French who first confronted the onslaught of English vocabulary, in the 19
20s, in reaction to quickly developing and globalizing American industry and technology. In 1937 the French created the Office de la langue française, whose sole purpose was to create French terms to substitute for the English ones creeping into the language. This responsibility was not given to the French Academy, which, of course, is not known for keeping up with the times. Since then France has founded, renamed and refounded a dozen similar offices, commissions, councils, committees and agencies.
In the 1990s it finally settled for Délégation générale à la langue française, later updated with the addition of “et aux langues de France” (DGLFLF). Julie visited their office on Rue des Pyramides in Paris. The modern building is no match for the ornate Institut de France, which houses the French Academy, but the DGLFLF plays a far more important role in regulating modern French in France. It coordinates the work of about twenty terminology commissions in eighteen government ministries. The committees comprise professionals in specific fields—engineers or experts in trades, rarely linguists—who work on a volunteer basis to collect terminology being used from foreign languages. Language experts at the DGLFLF then draw up lists of alternatives and send them to the Commission générale de terminologie et de néologismes, part of the prime minister’s office, for approval. The approved terms are published in the Journal Officiel. They are obligatory only for civil servants working in the specific fields to which they apply. According to Bénédicte Madinier, head of language development at the DGLFLF, they are adopted in about seventy percent of cases. The French Academy also views the lists and makes its own recommendations. As the head of the DGLFLF told us, “They only give their opinion at the end of the process.” But Bénédicte Madinier told Julie that she was on the phone literally every day with colleagues in Quebec, looking for ideas for French terms to substitute for English professional vocabulary. “In France we don’t put nearly as much energy into translating as Quebec does,” said Madinier.
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