When I want to name it, it slips away, my tongue. She takes the words out of my mouth. How to talk about it without choosing, between the written or the oral, the urban, the rural, the maternal, the intellectual, the vulgar, the mixed, the anglicized, the archaic, the poetic, the insulting, the forgotten one, the enemy? They all have heritage value, my languages, even if they are not all locked up in books. And even if they sometimes argue with each other. Writing harnesses, constrains, sterilizes. Oral language disappears, is absent, sometimes disappears.
Going back in time using film archives, Félix Rose, the son of Paul, that of the FLQ, retraces in the documentary The Battle of Saint-Léonard the fierce fight led by Raymond Lemieux for the integration of immigrants into French schools, in the Saint-Léonard district, several years before Law 101.
Amid the black and white images of the 1960s, we are impressed to see the pugnacity of the activists for the French language, the young people who occupy schools, who demonstrate in the streets, in Parliament, placards in hand, keeping their heads high under the insults. Those of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, for example, then federal Minister of Justice, who will address, in English, the language of Quebecers of “ lousy French “, a “lousy language”, adding that he will not give extended powers to Quebecers as long as they speak joule. “Whether he’s lousy or not, we speak a language, that’s all,” replied a very young Michel Tremblay, whose play Sisters-in-law has just gone on stage, to questions from Bernard Derome.
Some sixty years later, minds, dulled by Law 101, have frankly calmed down on the subject of the French language. We read with a gloomy eye the statistical offensives on its future, mainly in Montreal, where the embers of the war of nerves between French-speakers and English-speakers continue to heat up in the shadows, on both sides of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. We are watching French classes for immigrants dwindle. We reprimand our children with a bit of weariness when they “pull”, when they “work”, brandishing a Franglais thought of as the distinctive banner of a generation bathed in rap. “As long as there is life, there is luck”, as the song says.
But the indisputable David Goudreault, this crazy lover of words and poetry, who has just been quoted in Little Robertgoes back to the barricades with It’s language!, collective work published in the new collection Le Robert Québec. He invited twelve writers to share their thoughts on linguistic heritage. “Refusing to be silent,” he wrote, “that’s already the essential thing. » And too bad if public opinion too often rhymes with intolerance.
Of all these testimonies, it was that of the Acadian singer Édith Butler who moved me the most. No one tells the history of the language like the Acadians, whether they live in Louisiana or New Brunswick. She knows how to distinguish the original accents of the Champlain era, “of Poitou, Charente, Aunis, Saintonge, the Basque Country, the island of Jersey, and many others Again “. She traces the interbreeding with indigenous languages. Then, at the very moment when, overseas, the French Academy was “eliminating a multitude of words, verbs and expressions, writing rules, slashing regional dialects to make it uniform, the French language in America, too far gone of all these linguistic upheavals, retained its rough, dense vocabulary, and its syntax of France before the Academy. In her village, she said, people pronounced on in anas in “the little boys playing the violin”. In the one next door, it was the opposite: “it’s dimonche, eat your meat,” they said.
There are languages that I love and others that I hate. The worst of all is the wooden tongue, the one which is not one, the one which says nothing under the guise of elegance, the one which goes in circles and goes nowhere, and which we hear too much often, particularly in government circles, in lieu of action.
But I still dream of traveling to Quebec to save some tasty Quebecois expressions from oblivion. On the Carleton wharf, in Gaspésie, last year, I learned that we say “have round feet” for “being intoxicated” and “putting skin over our eyes” when we go to bed. Recently, a friend from Beauce told me about people from her village who had once “grown up” in her barn. Language is living, but not eternal. You have to speak it, and repeat it, to make it last.
To watch on video
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