Yesterday, I posted a satirical piece about francophones’ attitudes towards French. I suspect the piece was misunderstood, which is of course the risk that comes with writing satirically. The text wasn’t meant to be taken at face value. I’d like to look at some of what I wrote, without the satirical angle this time.
I remember a conversation I had with two friends while at university. One of the friends was anglophone, and the other was francophone. All three of us were speaking in French.
At one point, the anglophone friend talked about his job. He used the words ma job to talk about his work. The francophone friend corrected him almost immediately. He said the anglophone should say mon emploi instead of ma job. He argued that ma job sounded inappropriate for the anglophone to use.
The anglophone said no, that his job was not an emploi. He explained that his job was just temporary work, and that it wasn’t his career. The francophone said the word emploi could be used for any kind of employment. The anglophone was probably splitting hairs for the sake of conversation, but what he was saying isn’t entirely crazy.
The francophone was right in the sense that emploi can be used for any kind of employment, but he was so caught up in his zeal to call out a québécois usage that he deemed inappropriate that he missed the nuance of what the anglophone wanted to convey. For the anglophone, the word emploi was incorrect because that word turned his job into something more important than what it really was to him.
In this case, my anglophone friend could have maybe used the word une jobine instead. This word conveys the idea of a small job or project, or in my friend’s case, “unimportant” work carried out just for the money. I avoided suggesting the word jobine to him in that moment, though. I didn’t want to give the francophone friend a heart attack by revealing such a québécois word to an anglophone.
This was the point that I wanted to make with the joke about saying posséder sexuellement le canidé domestique instead of fucker le chien. It would be incorrect to say posséder sexuellement le canidé domestique, even if the words in this made-up expression literally mean the same thing as the words in fucker le chien. It feels wrong to alter the expression like this because fucker sounds necessarily more crude than posséder sexuellement, and because canidé domestique sounds unnecessarily more scientific than chien. Similarly, saying mon emploi instead of ma job felt wrong to my anglophone friend because it added a level of seriousness to his temporary work in a way that he didn’t like.
The part about how posséder sexuellement le canidé domestique is the way that it’s said in France is also a joke. Nobody uses this expression, not in Québec and not in France. The idea behind the joke is this: eleminating an expression that sounds too québécois in favour of another one that sounds more like international French or like French from France does not automatically make the expression correct.
Perhaps you’ll remember the scene from 30 vies where a teacher corrects a student who describes a character he’s invented for a story as un tough. The teacher says he shouldn’t describe his character as un tough because tough is an anglicism; she says he should describe his character as un dur instead. The student, in turn, corrects the teacher by saying: Ben non! Dur, c’est moins tough que tough!
The student understands something that the teacher doesn’t: replacing a québécois usage for an international one doesn’t necessarily result in an improvement of language.
Pretty doesn’t equal right.
I’m not saying that speakers should always stay in the informal level of the québécois variety of French. Different language situations call for different kinds of French. What I am saying is that just because a word or expression belongs to an international kind of French doesn’t automatically make it inherently better, especially when using that word results in a change of meaning. Dur, c’est moins tough que tough.
I ended the piece by saying that one would be better off learning Spanish instead of French to avoid developing a complex of one’s own. I’m joking, of course. I don’t discourage anybody from learning French. Now that OffQc is approaching 1000 posts, I would hope there’d be no doubt on this point.
But behind this joke is my belief that we needlessly complicate the language learning experience for newcomers to Québec. We do newcomers no favours whatsoever by discouraging them from wanting to understand the way French is spoken in Québec. A teacher of French from Québec once accused me of teaching bad French on OffQc. What this teacher fails to recognise, much to my disappointment, is that native speakers of French and learners of French have very different needs.
I can only imagine the dismay he must have felt when he discovered I was presenting on OffQc the kind of language he probably strives to eradicate amongst his native French-speaking students. But a language learner does not have the luxury of being able to skip over the parts of language deemed incorrect. The language learner must learn to understand all of it — even the parts native speakers don’t think are very pretty.
The usual criticism about the way French is used in Québec is that more prestigious forms of language are rejected by speakers. If there is truth to this, then it mostly occurs between native speakers themselves. When a learner of French enters the scene, the tables are often turned and it’s the colloquial form of French that’s often rejected. This explains why so many learners of French have commented to me that Québecois French seems like a secret language, one that they aren’t allowed access to. Hiding the colloquial variety of French is very detrimental to newcomers. Not only does it limit how far they’ll go in the language, it can also erode their self-esteem because it makes them feel like outsiders who don’t belong.
I do my best to point out when certain usages are best to be avoided by learners. For example, I continue to discourage you from saying moé and toé because they are too heavily stigmatised by the native speakers. But I will never discourage you from learning to understand any aspect of language.
In French courses for newcomers to Québec, the colloquial language as used in Québec is almost entirely overlooked. Perhaps a better word would be shunned. This doesn’t mean students in those courses are learning French from France, though. They’re learning a standardised form of Québécois French — the kind used in the media, for example. But it’s not enough. Teaching newcomers only one register of language — the most prestigious one — puts them at a disadvantage.
I’ve seen too many examples of newcomers who’ve made a dedicated effort to learn French in these courses only to find themselves unable to communicate effectively in real language encounters. I do realise of course that there’s no student who’s going to walk out of any language course, no matter how fantastic the course may be, and speak effortless French. That would be utopic. But when I come across a newcomer who’s gone through all the levels of French and still doesn’t know that tu as almost always contracts to t’as when people speak colloquially, there’s a problem.
Yes, the responsibility for learning a language will always lie with the student. But if we’re going to go to the trouble of offering French courses in the attempt to help newcomers to integrate, can’t we please drop the ideology that the colloquial language of Québec is inferior and begin teaching newcomers the way people really speak in the kind of language situations they’re most likely to find themselves?
With all of this in mind, perhaps you’ll reread my text from yesterday and even find some humour in it this time — or disagree with it entirely, that’s fine too.
Yes! While at university in Montreal I took one of those intensive French courses. It was entirely things I had been learning back in the U.S. for Parisian French. It really didn’t help me order at Tim’s quickly or understand what francophones were saying when I was just trying to have a conversation with friend’s of friends. I was completely frustrated! It was the little side notes of “quebecois” that my classmates soon told me that made me so much more comfortable speaking French there. I mean, no one ever said anything but come on. I sounded like a pretentious idiot at the bagel place taking forever going “Je voudrais un jus…etc”!! Plus the little bits of Quebecois helped me get waiters, etc to actually stay in French with me as they knew I was trying to learn. My poorly accented and terrible “classic” French only ever got me English in response.
Great post
As a French teacher in Oklahoma and a “québécophile”, I very much appreciate this post! Merci!!
Known as mrquebec, I teach french at Clinton Community College in Plattsburgh, NY
Felix your satirical post was excellent. I totally appreciated what you were saying. And I love the quebecois phrases. It’s what will be most useful whenever I get the nerve to try and speak French in Northern Ontario. It is the uniqueness of the phrases that make it special and I’m enjoying your blog so much! C’est flyé.
Re the discussion above, I j’offre une toune des Colocs:
I think some of the thing you mention are true in the formal study of any language. I’ve heard ESL students who speak English the way Commander Data did the first couple of seasons on ST:TNG.
Has anyone tried doing one of the immersion courses where you both take classes and live (during the time you are taking classes) with a Quebecois family so you get a taste of how French in Quebec actually “works”? I’d love to know if they’re worth the money.
hi felix. i think you misunderstood my question about speaking in the simplest terms.just like in english, there are highclass words that i don’t know the meaning of cuz, i’ve NEVER used them. the scholars @ language cops who laugh at informal talk @ slang are putting down their own heritage. whether speaking with a quebecois, a franco ontarian,a parisian etc.i speak on my terms. i still use /tway/mway/icitte@always will.except for slang,which i translate the CORRECT? WAY,not only is there no tension,but also a revelation that this is the stuff used 400yrs. ago by our ancestors.in short, nothing’s lost in the translation.sure all languages evolve, so we are all going to learn something new.that’s what life’s about.i don’t speak in a conceited way speaking english,so i’m not doing it in french either.i’m with you on this.i think the best comparison of standard @ non standard french is italien/scillien.
Bravo Felix, I really agree with you on this and this is what I’ve been trying to tell everybody here (in Montréal), but it falls on deaf ears. Je viens de Toronto, j’habitais à Ottawa et à Montréal avec des non-francophones et j’habitais en Islande et à Québec avec des colocs francophones, j’avais pris des cours du français (et j’ai fait le programme J’explore à Québec). So I feel like I can say I’ve learned and lived in French in a wide array of settings.
And yet, I still think that most of my colloquial French that I can add with relative ease into a sentence and that makes me feel like I fit in more, comes from my time spent in a bilingual university in Ottawa, where Francophones from all over Québec and all over the world spoke in both English and French, switching languages easily from sentence to sentence.
Being a sociolinguist-in-training, I would like to add that it’s really interesting what you point out and it’s exactly the sort of issues that sociolinguists are interested in, these subtle ways of using language that the power to either include or exclude.
Also, thank you for this website, no matter what FLS teachers say to you, because it’s the best way I’ll ever get to know more usage and vocabulary for now!
Thanks Felix, great post. Been a student of French for years, can understand and converse in advanced French class, but when visiting Québec found it exceedingly difficult to comprehend or converse with real people. I recall looking (unsuccessfully) for courses that taught “Quebec French”…then thankfully found your website, which has helped immensely. Keep up the good work! Appreciate your tips on Québecois French.
I’m currently doing a FSL program in Quebec City, and while it has addressed quebecisms somewhat, I still feel like it has minimized them, almost guarded us from them, much to the detriment of the students trying to integrate. I’ve noticed that the leaders of the program systematically try to eradicate certain Quebec usages from the their speech when talking to the students (for example, never forming questions with ‘-tu,’ even if they do it that way almost exclusively in real life; trying to use way less anglicisms than normal). I didn’t get exposed to raw Quebecois in all its idiosyncratic glory until I started working with teenagers at Tim Hortons. I knew a lot about Quebec French’s peculiarities from reading your blog, but I was still surprised at how prevalent and numerous they are. No wonder people with standard French have trouble understanding.