Are we too touchy in Quebec about the way we express ourselves? I asked myself the question when I saw a professor of marketing from Concordia University say last week to podcast host Joe Rogan that “Quebec French is an affront to human dignity”. Nothing less.
Posted at 12:45 a.m. Updated at 9:25 a.m.
It’s a joke, of course. A premeditated provocation. A guru’s shock formula of ready-to-think. By pronouncing this sentence, Professor Gad Saad knew that she was going to react. A person would have written that on X – the new name for Twitter – that I would have barely shrugged. But coming from a professor at a Montreal university, on the most listened to podcast on the planet, I find that frankly distressing.
To tell the truth, this proudly displayed arrogance, tinged with a feeling of superiority, this uninhibited contempt for the language spoken in Quebec and for what most defines its culture puts me a little in your… I can’t find another word . My apologies to human dignity.
Perhaps my knee-jerk reaction says as much about me as it does about Professor Saad. He politely replied when I contacted him on Monday that he was busy promoting his new book on happiness and had nothing to add on the subject. “People have language and hearing preferences and I share mine. Italian is beautiful. Dutch is not,” he wrote to me, indicating that he did not wish to grant me an interview.
A few hours later, he wrote essentially the same thing on X, a social network where he has some 700,000 subscribers. “A few people are really really really really really really really really offended that I don’t find Quebec French (or Portuguese or Hebrew) to be aural pleasing. This is called a preference. Italian is beautiful. Dutch is not. Be anti-fragile. Don’t implode because you feel personally targeted. »
Professor Saad answered me in English (his preferred language on X/Twitter), while my question was in French and this Lebanese native speaks impeccable French. It is perhaps for him an insignificant detail. For me, this shows, in the circumstances, a lack of sensitivity to the language issue in Quebec. A sensitive subject if any, what he knows or should know. He has lived in Quebec for nearly 50 years.
I have already written it: I claim the right to speak my mother tongue – French, not “Quebec French” which is not a language – with its accent and its own expressions, without having to suffer ridicule from anyone. . Maybe I lack humor, maybe I express my own complexes and weaknesses in this way. It’s possible. French in Quebec is condemned to fragility.
Still, it would never occur to me to make fun of Gad Saad’s strong Lebanese accent when he speaks French. I expect the same savoir-vivre, the same delicacy from him. Especially since he has lived in Quebec since childhood and raised his own children there. That, it seems, is asking too much of him.
When my son, who himself is of Lebanese origin, was told at age 11 by a coach at a soccer camp in France that he had a “comical accent”, he replied tit for tat that it was involuntary humor because everyone has an accent, in Montreal as in Marseille or Paris. Even in Beirut…
Some have more acuity at 11 than others at 58. In his defense, Professor Saad, chatting about this and that with Joe Rogan for two and a half hours, also broke the sugar on Portuguese – a language that does not seem “natural” to him – and on Hebrew, one of the four languages he speaks. On the other hand, the one whose mother tongue is Arabic considers that there is no Arabic more elegant than that spoken in Lebanon. You surprise me, as they say in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
There is an important difference between saying that you are less seduced by the sound of one language than by another and publicly declaring that “Quebec French is an affront to human dignity”. This is to imply that the French spoken in Quebec is a bastardized form of French. A kind of “sub-language”, a hiccup, which does not deserve to exist.
“These are individual comments that Concordia does not share and which do not represent the university,” a university spokeswoman told me on Monday. I hope so. I wonder what I would have been told if a Concordia professor had said that “Palestinian Arabic is an affront to human dignity” or “Hebrew is an affront to human dignity”…
Gad Saad holds the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption at Concordia University. Host of a popular YouTube channel, Professor Saad is a recurring guest on the controversial Joe Rogan podcast and has been a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in the United States.
This herald of anti-Wokism, close to the conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson, is worried about the rise of “militant feminism” and the demands of minority groups on university campuses.
He is the author of the essay The new viruses of thought: Wokism, cancel culture, racialism… and other ideologies that kill common sense. In short, he is an intellectual who knows the weight of words. He could have answered me yesterday that his words had exceeded his thoughts, which would not have surprised me. He could have pretended it was a joke not to be taken seriously. Instead, he chose to reply, in English, that he was entitled to his “language preferences,” adding a layer of arrogance about X/Twitter.
Professor Saad, who is quick to denounce the “slippages” he attributes to “wokism”, can well call anyone “fragile” who finds his remarks deplorable. This does not change the contempt he openly displays, without the slightest contrition, for his host society. As we say in good Quebec, grow, but grow equal…
