Quebec has launched its latest salvo in the ongoing battle to stop the decline of the French language.
The target this time: people who use English words in the middle of French sentences.
In a new ad, the province is encouraging people not to use ‘franglais.’
The video ad opens with a shot of a peregrine falcon flying majestically. Describing the bird in French, the narrator calls it “vraiment sick,” and says it’s known to be “assez chill.”
“Sick” and “chill” are not words you’d hear in a real French language nature documentary, and that’s exactly the point.
The narrator calls the falcon’s hunting skills ” soient insane,” and that its future is “demeure sketch.”
“We didn’t want to accuse English speakers, we just want all Quebecers to realize that the French language is in difficulty in Quebec so everyone can do something to improve our French language,” explained French Language Minister Jean-François Roberge.
Université de Montréal communications professor François Cooren said he regularly hears his own kids throwing English words into French sentences, much like the narrator does in the ad.
“I can definitely hear that around myself, for sure,” he told Global News “As a person who loves this language, it saddens me that young kids or adults are sometimes misusing it, in my opinion.”
He recognizes that with Quebec being surrounded by a sea of anglophones, it’s normal that francophones borrow words from English.
“The problem is when it’s becoming too much. When is it too much? Obviously, we all have different sensitivities,” Cooren said, adding that the influence of English has only widened with the prevalence of social media platforms and streaming services.
Linguistics scholar Monica Heller, who has been researching the interaction of French and English for four decades, makes the point that French is full of words borrowed from other languages.
“The boundaries are fuzzy,” said the University of Toronto professor emerita. “There’s lots of words in what we call French that come from other languages, like Arabic, like ‘coton,’ for example, comes from Arabic, ‘orange’ comes from Arabic.”
She poses the question: who gets to decide what the true boundaries of French are? Heller says demanding young people fall in line with a particular version of the language could backfire.
“One of your jobs when you’re a teenager in particular is to piss off your parents. If, as parents, we hand on a silver platter to our kids ‘la qualité de la langue’ as something that they can use to piss us off, we should expect them to do that,” she said.
Both professors called the ads “clever.” They will be running on TV and radio.