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linc.cis.upenn.edu>While I would be happy in personal exchanges to discuss language in Quebec at whatever length anyone desires, I fear that this debate may seem to have gone on too long for those with no personal involvement in the matter. I will therefore make just this reply to an earlier posting addressed largely to me but will then try to let others carry on the discussion publicly. An observation: It seems to me that most of those express- ing unhappiness with the official language-policy in Quebec have been either (i) anglophone former residents of Quebec or (ii) an- glophones who have never resided in Quebec. The first group obviously knows what they're talking about, but I can't help wondering how much the second group really knows about Quebec. For example, Mr. Hoequist responds to a comment that francophone Quebecois seem to be succeeding in gaining control of their own destiny by saying, "I would hope they're successful; they don't have any competition". But there certainly is competition. First, while "many" anglophones have indeed left Quebec (although we don't know that language was the reason for all of these people), there remain quite a few of them at the head of some of the most important businesses in Quebec. This fact is well known to anglophones in Quebec; for example, an English- speaking student at Penn recently stated that Quebec would never become independent because "English-speakers control all the big businesses". Because of the socio-religious reasons I mentioned in my previous message, these anglophones have a big head-start in running Quebec's economy. Second, Quebec does not exist in a vacuum and, if its products and services were not competitive, anglophones who did not mind learning French could easily put themselves in a position to play a major role in and even domi- nate Quebec's economy (just as, e.g., many Japanese and Saudi Arabian businesspeople have learned English well enough to dominate certain aspects of trade in some Western countries). In this regard, the francophone business community of Quebec already has extensive contacts with English speakers all over the world, and these contacts will by no means diminish, whatever happens in the future. This kind of interaction is one of the sources that encourages francophone Quebecois to learn English well (Mr. Hoequist had asked what kind of contact the present pro-French linguistic policy of Quebec makes possible with English). But there are many others: the many scientific books and journals published only in English, the English-language TV, radio, and newspaper and magazine media in Canada (including Quebec) and the United States, tourism in the rest of Canada, the U.S., and the rest of the world (except francophone Europe and Africa). Strange as it may seem to some, the desire to make French dominant for official domestic purposes in Quebec does not exclude the desire to be competent in English for external purposes. Some discussants seemed to be upset by the fact that "many" English-speakers left Quebec because they did not want to learn French. This is not a new phenomenon; one ex-Quebec resident pointed out that there are small towns where almost no one has learned French in the 200 years or more that their inhabitants have been in Quebec. But it must not be forgotten that there are relatively large communities of French-speakers in many parts of both western and eastern Canada outside of Quebec. I'm curious why Hoequist and some others have not spoken out in favor of protecting the linguistic rights of these French-speakers. For example, Sault Ste-Marie (notice the name), a town in Ontario, recently voted itself "monolingual English-speaking", implying that it would make no concessions to any French speakers who also live or visit there. Worse, the French-speaking population of Northern Maine retained a flourishing educational and literary (journalistic) system until approximately 1960, when state laws abolished French schools. Since that time, there has been a drastic reduction in the number of young people who speak French. It is precisely such examples of the linguistic "benevolence" shown by the United States toward French that makes francophone Quebecois feel they need to enact measures like the law requiring the official use of French. Concerning certain statements about Quebec French: I'm sorry if I gave anyone the impression that I believe Quebec French and French French to be two distinct languages; I thought I had said explicitly that I consider them to be closely related dialects of one language (although, as I and others have ob- served, dialect vs. language is more than a linguistic question). Mr. Hoequist states that he too believes the Quebec and France varieties of French to be such related dialects and also rejects the implication of having said that "Paris should dictate to the whole world what French should be". But Hoequist still maintains that it is illegitimate for Quebec to choose not to use "stop" on its traffic signs. His rationale is that, if France French happens to use a borrowed English word for a certain purpose, then Quebec cannot legitimately deny anyone the use of that word on signs in Quebec. This is admittedly a masterful trick of logic: all that supporters of the use of English in Quebec have to do in order to get English words on signs is to find cases where people in another country use that word when speaking or writing French. However, this is a little like saying that an American who is injured because he doesn't understand a sign saying "Mind the lorries" in an Englishman's trucking company in New York isn't entitled to accuse that Englishman of negligence, just because it happens that, in another country, "mind" is used for "watch out for" or "beware of" and "lorry" is used for "truck". To tell Quebecois that they have to accept France French borrowings from English on their signs feels to me like saying: if Paris accepts "stop", then who are we, several million of Quebec French speak- ers, to reject it? I don't know if the European French can "stopper leur voiture a une intersection", but all the (other) Quebecois that I know "arretent leur auto", they cannot "stopper" it. The word exists in Quebec French, but only in other usages, like for stopping hemorrhages: "stopper une hemorragie". One could say that "stop" instead of "arret" is no more acceptable than it would be to label a sign warning against snow banks with the French word "congere" (virtually unknown in Quebec; e.g. not found in the Dictionnaire canadien) instead of Quebecois "banc de neige". As the latter shows, Quebec doesn't automatically reject loan translations. (It should be noted, however, that this dis- cussion of "stop" may be misleading, since, on most traffic signs, the problem of understanding a particular word(s) used is made moot by the fact that 90% of Quebec's traffic signs now use iconic pictograms (source: "L'actualite", April 15, 1991, p. 61).) The acceptance of borrowings in a language is mostly NOT a linguistic question but rather a social one. If the French are comfortable using English words like "weekend", "shopping", and "software", good for them. That they should dislike English borrowings into French less than Quebecois do is easily under- standable, given that English does not threaten their language in their own country. The general feeling in Quebec is that we have perfectly acceptable French words to refer to the same realities ( "fin de semaine", "magasinage", and "logiciel", respectively) and that it is therefore preferable to use them. Where official decisions have to be made by the government as to, for example, what should be used in official public signs and in correspon- dence, why can't we make our own decision? Would anyone ever think of forcing the French to use "magasinage" for "shopping"? Finally, there is the issue of fairness and consistency outside of the competition between French and English in Quebec. Several postings (e.g., by Paul Chapin and Vicki Fromkin) have asked how one can oppose the U.S. English (only) movement and support the Quebec French language policy without being inconsis- tent or at least going through some pretty elaborate ethical contortions. First of all, I believe John Goldsmith's posting has already addressed this issue squarely: the U.S. English movement appears to be quite hostile to immigration; many sup- porters of the movement would apparently like to prevent immigra- tion to the U.S. by non-English speakers. Quebec, on the other hand encourages immigration and imposes only the reasonable requirement that immigrants' children will be schooled in French, the dominant language in their new homeland. I would only add that, even in French-speaking schools, there is compulsory second-language instruction in English starting in about grade 5 and continuing through grade 11. Furthermore, there are no restrictions against anyone attending weekend or nighttime classes in English. From this, I hope it is obvious that the goal of the Quebec language policy is to make all immigrants to Quebec fluent in French for general purposes of life in the province, not to discourage English. As for myself, I don't see how anyone can compare this to the absence of Spanish-speaking schools in most of the American Southwest, which is--to the best of my knowledge--at least an indirect violation of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by which the U.S. took from Mexico what is now CA, AZ, NM, and several other states or parts of states. Perhaps we can now turn this debate in Linguist to a discus- sion of what linguistic rights were legally promised to Hispanics in the United States in 1848, especially as regards schools and public use of language for official purposes. I would be inter- ested in learning the facts of this situation from anyone who has real expertise in it. --Julie Auger P.S. Margaret Fleck has asked why not compare academic Parisian French and working-class Quebec French. Well, one could of course make that comparison, but there is no non-arbitrary reason to choose those two particular varieties than there is to compare academic Montreal French with working-class Marseille French. The point is that, in any serious linguistic study, one wants to control as much as one can for potential interfering variables. If the object of study is geographical variation, for example, one wants to make sure that the differences observed are really attributable to geography and not to social-class. If, however, the goal is to identify both social and geographical differences, then one wants to make sure that the sample of speakers contains representatives from a comparable range of socio-economic classes in each geographical variety. In short, you can always compare any two things, but certain conditions have to be met in order for the comparison to be revealing. [End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 205]Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue