Rare are the days when Duty does not publish at least one article, column or opinion letter on French. The lack of interest raised in the Quebec media by the publication in the fall of the last volume of the 9e edition of Dictionary of the French Academy therefore surprising. However, the 8e edition dated from 1935, and the 9e was the subject of significant media coverage in France.
While its relevance is celebrated in some publications, others have expressed reservations. For example, the collective Les Linguistes atterrées questions the relevance of a dictionary whose writing took place over several decades, which contains out-of-date, racist and sexist definitions, and which reveals the absence of widespread words and meanings. and already present in professional dictionaries, such mail in the sense of “email”.
Several factors explain the lack of interest generated by the publication of the Dictionary of the French Academy in Quebec. The very marginal role that the Académie française plays within the Quebec population undoubtedly has something to do with it. Of course, many Quebecers welcomed the election of Dany Laferrière to this institution. However, we must recognize that we hear little about the Académie française in Quebec and that the comments that reach us do not promote a positive perception of the organization.
For example, Maurice Druon often made contemptuous comments towards Quebec women because of their use of feminine forms to designate women who occupy positions formerly reserved for men. But the most important reason for this silence probably concerns the redundancy of this dated and imperfect dictionary compared to the excellent Quebec and French tools that exist elsewhere. For France, let us mention for example the dictionaries Larousse et Robertwhose annual publication is the subject of strong commercial hype which is taken up by the Quebec media.
What I want to focus on here concerns the wealth of Quebec tools that exist. Since the end of the 19th centurye century, differential glossaries, adaptations of dictionaries published in France, dictionaries for educational purposes and even a “Québécois-French” dictionary were published. Apart from the Multidictionarynone was able to impose themselves.
It was only in 2013 that a general dictionary of French in Quebec finally received a favorable reception: Usitoprepared by a team of linguists from the University of Sherbrooke, is available online for free. It has more than 75,000 entries and is subject to regular updates. There we find general French words and words specific to Quebec French, such as cegep or maple grovebut also different meanings from those found in the rest of the French-speaking world (for example, flag for a building belonging to a university or hospital).
This dictionary describes “contemporary French in public and valued use of Quebec, and more broadly of Canada”, and, in its beginnings, it therefore left out many familiar elements (for example, coronations). It has since expanded its mission to provide a complete portrait of Quebec French, making more room for the colloquial language. Thus, articles are created for many previously absent words, e.g. bathers (“embarrass, interrupt someone in their activities”), magané (“abused, weakened, damaged”) and placoter (” chat “). We can therefore think that placottoirwhich is already the subject of an entry in Wiktionary, will soon make its entry in this dictionary. The richness of this dictionary is such that the Quebec Ministry of Education has made it the recommended resource for all French tests.
Two tools developed by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) to guide the Quebec population in their linguistic choices are accessible free of charge in its Linguistic Showcase: the Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique (GDT) and the Linguistic Troubleshooting Bank (BDL). These tools are constantly evolving.
The BDL contains, according to the OQLF, a few thousand articles, while the GDT contains hundreds of thousands of terms and definitions. The GDT is not a general dictionary of the French language, but focuses on specialized terminology. We therefore find terminological proposals for specialized notions and translations of English terms, as well as indications on the terms approved by the OQLF.
As for the BDL, it contains articles on questions asked by users. For example: which preposition should be used with merci et thank ? To what extent is the use of bonjour in the sense of “goodbye”, common in Quebec, is it acceptable? If the responses often reflect a relatively prescriptive position, the very rich linguistic, historical and sociolinguistic details they contain guide Internet users in their use of French.
A third tool is the grammar correction and writing assistance software Antidote, developed by the Quebec company Druide Informatique. It contains dictionaries, word history and information about the constructions with which the defined words are associated and can be used in conjunction with word processing software.
In short, given the linguistic tools available in Quebec, we understand better why the publication of the last volume of the 9e edition of Dictionary of the French Academy went unnoticed there. In this context, we can only note that the last entry in the work captures the interest and reactions it aroused in Quebec: “zzz”!
