The “Quality of Language” Issue (Corpus Planning)
The Charter of
the French Language stipulates that French is the official language of Quebec
(section 1). But it says nothing about which variety of French should form the
basis of its norm. It has been commonly assumed that it was the variety
described in the most commonly used dictionaries and grammars (former deputy minister Jean-Claude
Corbeil, personal communication). At the time the Official Language Law (1972)
and the Charter of the French Language (1977) were passed, this meant
essentially dictionaries and grammars made by Europeans and published in Europe
(Commission des états généraux, 2001: 81). In litigious cases where there was
no consensus on which term was to be used in French or when there was no
agreement on what the proper translation was for an English term or phrase,
Quebec’s language agency, the Régie de la langue française (the name of the
language agency from 1972 to 1977), explained in 1976
(Régie, 1976: 9) that it was empowered by the law to officialise a French
equivalent and make its use compulsory in certain circumstances (in state
documents, in public advertising, in textbooks, etc.).
Nevertheless allowing
French to become Quebec’s official, common, and working language has meant an
increased preoccupation with social and regional variation. A debate developed
on which kind of French should be the official one: was it to be the
international standard historically based on Parisian French but increasingly
tolerant of local peculiarities (as evidenced by the introduction of many
‘Belgicisms’, ‘Quebecisms’, ‘Africanisms’, etc., in the major dictionaries
published in Paris)? Or was Quebec to establish its own standard variety placed
at the pinnacle of a series of hierarchised colloquial registers (as proposed
by the Conseil de la langue française, 1990: 30 and 50 and in various papers by
Cajolet-Laganière and Martel, e.g. 1996)?
For those
adhering to the second proposal, Quebec French is considered as an autonomous
language variety possessing its own standard, a standard that is said to
reflect the linguistic uses of the new French-speaking middle class, which
arose after World War II (Gendron, 1986). As linguist Jean-Denis Gendron (1986:
95) adds, this new predominant linguistic standard appears in public and
official discourses, both spoken and written. In 1990, the Conseil de la langue
française proposed to launch a comprehensive description of Quebec French uses
(at times abbreviated as... FUQ ‘français en usage au Québec’), including
standard uses. This led to the creation of the Franqus project based at the
Université de Sherbrooke; the project has received substantial funding from the
state (more than $3 M as of 2005, cf. Meney, 2005).
Others propose
to view the linguistic situation of Quebec as diglossical (e.g. Lamonde, 1998:
96-103; Barbaud, 1998; Maurais, 2008a, chapter 1; Meney, 2010). Typically,
diglossia means a situation where two language varieties are in contact, each
of them having certain spheres of social interaction assigned to it. The
relationship between the two language varieties is hierarchical: one has high, the
other has low prestige. According to this view, the high variety in Quebec
would be ‘international French’, used for example in official, commercial, and
scientific communications, while the low variety would be Quebec colloquial
French used mainly but not exclusively in non formal circumstances (see the
discussion by Meney, 2010: 102-122, esp. p. 106).
There is
therefore a two-fold division on the topic of which linguistic norm should be
favoured: on the one hand, those who hold that international standard French
should be the variety taught in schools; on the other hand, ‘endogenists’ who
propose that Quebec should officialise its own linguistic norm. ‘Endogenists’
have maintained for years that there is a consensus among Quebec linguists and
the general public on an endo-normative standard (e.g. Commission des états
généraux, 2001: 84 and Conseil de la langue française, 1990).
A proposal was
sent to the 2008 sovereignist Parti québécois convention asking that ‘the
teaching of French should be reoriented toward the acquisition of spoken and
written standard Quebec French’ (quoted by Paquot, 2009). Linguist Annette
Paquot intervened in the media before the proposal was discussed at the
convention (Paquot, 2008). She pointed out that the proposed new standard
differs only marginally from the established international norm (mainly easily
understandable lexical items) and that even supporters of this new standard
write their books and publish their papers in international standard French (Paquot,
2008 and 2009). The Parti Québécois convention finally made no move since
promoting a new language standard in schools was clearly not supported by
public opinion (this is of course reminiscent of the ‘Oakland Ebonics
controversy’ in the USA).
The rejection
of the proposal on standard Quebec French by the 2008 Parti Québécois
convention shows that there is obviously no consensus on the adoption of an
endo-normative standard in the public at large. Moreover many prominent
linguists (e.g. Barbaud, Meney, Nemni, Paquot) disagree on the existence of the
consensus peremptorily proclaimed in some official reports. Admittedly the
opponents just mentioned are foreign-born but many native Quebecers also
discourage the establishment of a local norm (for instance opinion leaders
Lysiane Gagnon at the daily La Presse
and Denise Bombardier at Le Devoir).
Also, this raises the issue of the discrimination that a new standard could
bring to immigrant citizens, a great number of whom are selected by the Department of Immigration
on the criterion that they already have a working knowledge of French – a
knowledge usually acquired abroad at school where the only variety of French
taught is ‘international French’. This argument was developed by Maurais
(2008b) who advised choosing the standard that would create the least
discrimination.
The absence of
a consensus on a new local linguistic norm is also evidenced by the results of
opinion polls: in surveys done in 1998 and 2004 about half the respondents felt
that they spoke Québécois while the other half felt that they spoke French
(Maurais, 2008a: 19).
On the basis
of the opinion poll results published by Maurais (2008a), it has been argued by
Paquot (2009) and by Meney (2010) that if there is at all a consensus on the
linguistic variety to be taught in Quebec’s schools, it does not tend to
support the claim made by the proponents of an autonomous norm. Quite the
reverse: 76.8% of respondents (all native French-speakers born in Quebec) think
that international French should be the standard variety taught in schools
while 88.3% think that it is advisable that reference books used in schools
(such as grammars and dictionaries) should be the same in all French-speaking
countries.
Despite the above, the OQLF’s Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique (Grand Terminological Dictionary,
hereafter GDT) has maintained its new orientation adopted in the early 2000's, which
favours the acceptance of colloquial words (including loan-words and loan-translations). The GDT merely tags
them with the label “langue courante”, but this is not done
systematically. This approach, in its core more lexicographical than
terminological, was denounced in a manifesto by 19 former OQLF’s
terminologists. These terminologists were supported by more than a hundred
other terminologists, translators and copy-editors (Manifesto, 2011; for a
critical assessment of the GDT, see Meney, 2010: 405-443).
All in all,
the debate over which variety of French should prevail still goes on but
supporters of ‘international French’ have made headway and the former
chairperson of the Conseil supérieur de la langue française Conrad Ouellon
declared his preference for international French (CSLF, 2010: 2).
_______
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