In Quebec, all language news is bad
The 2016 census data on language, released last week, offer good news for Quebec’s language guardians. The number of residents who claim knowledge of French rose, albeit minutely, to 94.5 per cent, and the number who don’t speak French fell slightly as well: just 4.6 per cent claimed knowledge of English only, and 0.9 per cent knowledge of neither English nor French.
The same was true in greater Montreal: 91.3 per cent of the four million residents claimed knowledge of French, up slightly from 91.1 per cent. And the same was even true in the wantonly cosmopolitan city of Montreal proper, where language hawks tend to look as a last resort for signs of impending doom: 87.3 per cent of its 1.7 million inhabitants claimed knowledge of French, up from 86.9 per cent in 2011.
Naturally, the Parti Québécois saw this as nothing less than a crisis for the French language. Leader Jean-François Lisée promised this week that his government would introduce legislation requiring all new immigrants to speak French before they arrive, requiring students at anglophone CEGEPs and universities to demonstrate facility in la langue de Parizeau before receiving their diplomas and degrees, and making it even more difficult for medium-sized businesses to operate except in French.
“Bill 202 would be introduced in the first 101 days of a PQ government,” Lisée promised. (You see what he did there?) “If we keep going in this direction, it will bring us to a tipping point. We never want to see that tipping point.”
If more people are speaking French, what’s Lisée upset about? This is what: “Fewer Quebecers say they speak French at home (87 per cent in 2011 compared to 86.4 per cent in 2016),” Radio-Canada reported, and “French as a mother tongue also declined in the province, from 79.7 per cent to 78.4 per cent.”
I suppose I won’t convince anyone that a tiny drop in the percentage of French-speaking households is anything other than a crisis. That said, the data might be dodgy. Statistics Canada announced Friday it had erroneously reported anglophone influxes into monolithically francophone areas. And the census data suggest Montrealers spoke more French at home in 2016 than in 2011, even as the provincewide trend was downward. That’s at the very least counterintuitive.
This “mother tongue” malarkey is simply disreputable, though, and it’s remarkable how quickly it has become part of the mainstream conversation.
Respectable Quebec nationalists insist theirs is a movement open to all who learn the language and accept their culture as secondary to the native one. If you’re complaining about what language people spoke when they were toddlers even as more and more Quebecers are speaking French, you’re just giving the game away: no matter how integrated those immigrants become, their existence will be a negative indicator.
Partly, Quebec’s various angsts are entirely understandable. A francophone province of eight million people is an unlikely thing to find on a continent of almost 400 million anglophones. It makes sense people would be protective, and maybe a bit paranoid. But paranoia is still paranoia: there is no meaningful movement against official bilingualism in Ottawa, and no meaningful threat to French’s future in Quebec.
Partly, Quebec’s linguistic politics is a self-defeating madness: unilingualism is not a good quality for someone in Quebec to have, on account of the aforementioned 400 million anglophones, and yet the very idea of bilingualism is still viewed with suspicion by many language hawks.
(I met a Dutchman on holiday last month who was utterly flummoxed by Quebec. One of the great advantages of being Dutch, he said, was the necessity of growing up — and arriving at adulthood — multilingual. The 2016 census data show the number of Quebecers who say they can only conduct a conversation in French dropped below 50 per cent between 2011 and 2016. In an alternate Canadian universe, that would be a good news headline.)
And partly, let’s face it, we’re just talking about garden-variety nativism dressed up for Sunday dinner.
“Language is like a tree,” Lisée told reporters. “Speaking French as a second language is like all the leaves on the tree, but the roots of the community, of a language, are people who do live primarily in this language and culture.”
Well, that’s quite a conundrum. Immigration can help on the language front, but Quebecers are quite suspicious about the folkways those immigrants bring with them — especially when they involve headgear. If they won’t fall in line, and since Quebecers aren’t having babies at nearly a sufficient clip to keep their, uh, culture tree growing, I don’t know what else to suggest.
Paranoid nativism is certainly an option to keep the troops entertained, so to speak. It always has been. But it’s not a good look.
NATURALLY, THE PARTI QUÉBÉCOIS SAW THIS AS NOTHING LESS THAN A CRISIS FOR THE FRENCH LANGUAGE.