Park Ex stickers seen from France
Le Monde has a short item on those francisation stickers placed around Park Extension recently. Le Monde is blunt enough to describe the new language law as “une nouvelle loi restreignant l’usage de l’anglais dans la ville québécoise” whereas here, the official line is always that the intention is to save French, not repress English.
Bob 11:52 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
Well, the official line is nonsense. It has never been about preserving French, and we know this because of the Quebec government’s attitude toward minority language rights outside of Quebec – let French die in the ROC for the sake of killing English in Quebec.
The whole idea of “preserving” a language is perverse conservatism – and that’s why it comes up in right-wing, racist contexts, like the “preservation” of English in the US. Which French is being “preserved”? How far back do we go to find that “pure” French without foreign influences? French is not pure, it’s a mash of many languages, as are pretty much all the languages whose purity right-wing racists worry about. On the stickers: “Lait. Poulet. Navet.” Latin, Spanish, and Latin. “Feta. Gouda. Tapioca.” Greek, Dutch, and Guarani via Portugeuse. “Bonbon. Rayon. Melon” Latin, Old German, Latin. But never English (45% of whose words are of French origin)! When you ask for more cheese on your Greek salad(French) at a restaurant(French) on Park(French) Avenue(French), you had better use the French(French) version(French) of “feta”!
Chris 21:53 on 2023-08-16 Permalink
>The whole idea of “preserving” a language is perverse conservatism – and that’s why it comes up in right-wing, racist contexts
Hmm, does that include the countless CBC articles about preserving Native American languages?
jeather 10:07 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
True, when you strip the term “preserving a language” of any context about which language is being preserved, what they mean by preserved (from change vs from death, as an example), and why that language needs to be preserved, it does mean that “preserving English/French” is as neutral as “preserving [Indigenous language x]”, which is also never called “revitalizing” because Indigenous languages which have in the dozens or hundreds of speakers are in the same situation as English and French which have in the tens or hundreds of millions of native speakers alone.
Kevin 11:12 on 2023-08-17 Permalink
Chris
Only if you confuse languages with ethnicities, as is deliberately done by MBC et al.