#i'll never apologize for my copious frenglish out of the office

[leam1983]

On Linguistics

If you're familiar with Quebec, you know we have two official languages, and a recent strong push to add at least one third out of the handful of major Native American dialects spoken between the Saint Lawrence River basin and the upper North Coast. Unofficially, we have tertiary and, well, quarternary languages like Spanish and Mandarin.

The funny thing about my native language - French - is that Quebec's native speakers never really stepped off of a certain victimhood complex. I'm all for defending my native tongue, but I'm still a far cry from claiming that we're one or two generations away from ending up like certain Louisiana parrishes, where French is the focus of hyper-specialized classes attended by a nigh-on-invisible minority. We've got major Francophone news and media outlets, we can be served in French on a day-to-day basis, and being bilingual is, in many ways, more of a fun aside than a necessity.

More below.

Where I'm sort of confused is when my father prints out an article from Le Devoir that carries an editorial by Gérard Bouchard. For those who don't know, Bouchard is an author, a linguist, an essayist and a Postgrad professor that's focused on the particularities of French as spoken in Quebec. The article in question is titled Le Québec langue, which you could translate as meaning "Quebec as a language".

Said article is an exxagerated simulation of all of the anglicizations we use on a daily basis, and then ends with a sardonic note: the narrator is worried he'll have to pick up English for his new job, when he's spent twelve paragraphs with a roughly 50/50 ratio of French and English words in the same sentence.

The article doesn't pick sides, it simply illustrates a point. My father wags it in my face and says "See?! This is what your job is doing to you! This is how all of you Millennials sound; you can't find the right words for things in French even if not finding them would kill you!"

I look up from my script draft for Eastern Ontario - Kanata and the like - and realize I'll call a chunk of the country where a different set of roots for different idiolects of French has taken shape. Our English loan-words aren't the same in Ontario, and Franco-Ontarians have a deep history with so, used outside of its normal grammatical guidelines. It never implies a relation, but rather causation. "J'étais fatigué, so j'suis allé me coucher."

I ask my father to name one language of which the structure hasn't been altered by emergent technologies or new cultural trends. I tell him one springs to mind. He waffles for a bit, then admits defeat.

Latin. Latin is fixed in place. Latin doesn't shift, follow trends or alter itself to fit different regions. Latin has stripped itself of everything that isn't of scientific or religious importance, and only now are modern linguists attempting to piece it back together to the extent that it becomes a modern and complete conversation vector.

For all of the efforts of modern Latin schools, Latin is a dead language. The percentile of people who speak it at home is minuscule. The percentile involving everyday speakers is just as small. I remember seeing YouTube's Luke Ranieri pop-quiz deacons around the publically-accessible parts of Vatican City, and the only one who could hold a beginner-level conversation in Latin was Ugandan. The Italian, British and French deacons gave up after a scant few words.

That isn't the case for French. Millions of people use it everyday. It covers prose, everyday discussion, poetry, science, mathematics, emergent technologies, matters of faith and politics alike - it's alive. Just as alive as English is, and both languages are rife with new additions and subcultural plug-ins. You only need look at this freaking hellsite to see it for yourselves. This is the only place where saying you're writing a drabble on your scrunkly scrimblos wouldn't possibly raise eyebrows, and where you'd receive nods of understanding.

Of course, some purists see this as language being corrupted. I don't. French is alive precisely because it makes room for Anglicized words without rejecting its own French constructs. It's alive because I can speak to my IT colleagues in that language without feeling that there's a language level that's missing, in regards to, say, the need to reinstall Kubernetes or some colleague's missing credentials. I don't need to switch to a pidgin if I have to help out a colleague from the call center, and I also don't need to shoot for excessively formal constructs, either. Living languages are flexible. Latin isn't.

Predictably enough, however, this doesn't do it for my father and his dyed-in-the-wool Separatist roots. French is always under threat, as far as he's concerned, because we're geographically close to a basin that doesn't give a shit about our own culture - or so he believes. I always remind him that we're an annoyance to everyone in the ROC - who wishes we could just stick to English to make things easier for everyone - and a curiosity to people down south. To Americans, I'm a Budget Frenchman; a funny guy who gets American points of interest but who sometimes articulates them in a language that's rooted on the other side of the Atlantic.

As this brings up another thing: my French isn't even the "proper" French the Académie Française tries to drill into our heads at a young age, it's the French of colonists who left the Old Country in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. My French is the French of deported criminals and pardoned thugs, of provincial prostitutes and uneducated guys and gals tossed halfway across the globe on vain promises of royal cash and an allotted plot of land. My French is to French what Texas' drawl is to Elizabethan English, or what Ottawa's vaguely-Celtic consonants are to Australia's open vowels.

So what is there to defend, here? Do we cling to some arbitrary definition of a "proper" idiolect and insult everyone between myself and my fellow Cajun speakers between Montreal and Biloxi, or do we accept what linguistics teaches us, and that all signs, all signifiers, are arbitrary? Languages just can't evolve without that central aspect, that understanding that those who make up the sounds and structure of a language are its speakers.