The Story of French (52 page)

Law 101 provoked a lot of Quebec-bashing in both the Canadian and American media. American journalists thought that anglophone Quebeckers had lost their rights to an English-speaking lawyer and trials in English, and even to education and health services in English. The ideas were alarming, but mostly false. At the time of the law’s twentieth anniversary, in 1997, the government of Quebec wanted to respond to these misconceptions, so Guy Dumas organized four focus groups in Washington, New York City, Chicago and Atlanta. “We gave a questionnaire to a group of opinion makers and collected the answers, then used the opportunity to give them the right answers,” remembers Dumas, who is himself married to an Australian-born, Toronto-raised epidemiologist. “They believed that there were no English public schools in Quebec and that people had no right to speak in English at trials. Some even believed the basic principle of our law was that people were guilty until proven innocent!” Now, nearly thirty years later, the controversy in Canada over the law has waned. It still has its sharp critics, but the general principle is largely accepted. The Supreme Court of Canada is often called upon to rule on specific points of the law’s application, but it no longer demands “proof” of the need to protect the French language, a strong indication that the Supreme Court adheres to the basic principle and necessity of language protection in Quebec. At the same time, individual plaintiffs regularly challenge the validity of the law in the courts, and this keeps the Quebec government on its toes.

More important, time has shown that the language law is not only balanced, but also effective. French is now the predominant language of the province. Even in Montreal, where most of the anglophone community and most immigrants live, the situation is best described as one of linguistic peace. And while English remains a force to contend with, language assimilation is no longer a one-way street. Quebec’s anglophone community has in fact become much more bilingual than the francophone majority. Immigrants still resist the idea of learning French, but most have accepted the situation and are progressively assimilating to the francophone majority. The face of Montreal, which was English only forty years ago, is now predominantly French. The law does not affect trademarks, but many companies have chosen to modify their name in order to appeal to local customers. In Quebec, Kentucky Fried Chicken is known not as KFC, but as PFK (Poulet Frit Kentucky), even though in France it remains KFC. And software companies are managing to translate for the Quebec market.

At the turn of the millennium the Office québécois de la langue française refined its approach to its two basic missions of Frenchifying business and creating French terminology. A company seeking its certificate of francisation is evaluated on dozens of criteria, including how the company communicates with its employees and the public. Companies with more than a hundred employees must create a
comité de francisation
(Frenchification committee) composed of equal numbers of representatives of employees and executives. Eighty percent of Quebec companies with more than fifty employees are certified.

Contrary to a popular Canadian myth, the Quebec government doesn’t have much power to change signs that aren’t in French or to actually force Frenchification on large companies. The Office doesn’t try to convert businesses to French; it just makes sure that the employees’ right to work in French and the public’s right to communicate in French are respected. Another popular myth has it that the tongue troopers issue fines. In reality, companies that refuse to comply are taken to court. “Ninety percent of them seek an out-of-court settlement,” says Dumas. The government doesn’t have the power either to close companies or to remove products from shelves. “But those who refuse to comply with the law cannot get subsidies or do business with the government,” says Dumas.

On the other hand, as Guy Dumas explained to us, the Office realized over time that it could not let its guard down. “At the beginning we thought that the certificate of Frenchification was enough, but then we saw that, to make the measure effective, we had to ask companies to report every three years on their linguistic situation [another condition for obtaining the certificate].” Indeed, changes in ownership or even in personnel mean that the idea of using French has to be driven home again and again. Chrysler now produces manuals in French, but Chrysler’s latest Model 300 came out with a computer that displayed extremely faulty French, including “
Bas Fluide de Rondelle
” for “Low Washer Fluid” instead of “
Bas Niveau de Lave-glace.
”

The Office typically has other problems with smaller businesses. Although businesses with fewer than fifty employees aren’t required to have certificates of Frenchification, their signs must give precedence to French. Out of rebelliousness, or mere practicality, some Montreal merchants push the limits of acceptable French on their signs. We walk regularly in Montreal’s Mount Royal Park, and on our way there we pass a garage that was once called George General Auto Repair. To respect the language law, George just added a few letters to his sign by hand; it now reads, in less than passable French, “George Général d’Auto Réparation.”

Terminology is the field in which the Office québécois de la langue française really excels; even the French use it as a reference. There are many reasons for Quebec’s strong performance. One is size: the Office québécois de la langue française has 215 employees, sixty of whom are terminologists, whereas France’s equivalent, the DGLFLF, has about thirty employees and seven terminologists and depends largely on volunteers to report on terms in the workplace. More important, Quebec’s terminologists act quickly. Quebec decided long ago that concepts and inventions with English names had to be translated right away, and that catchy French substitutes had to be created before English terms caught on. Quebec’s Office monitors new technologies very carefully. This was how they created the famous
courriel
for e-mail, a contraction of
courrier électronique,
that also rhymes with another well accepted creation:
logiciel
(software). The same thinking was applied to junk mail, producing
pourriel,
which combines
poubelle
(garbage) and
logiciel.
Another example is
clavardage
(Internet chat), which combined
clavier
(keyboard) with
bavardage
(chat). The latest example of creativity involved the Internet term
phishing,
which they adapted as
hameçonnage
(from
hameçon,
hook). Quebec’s language commission doesn’t always come up with such great terms as
courriel, pourriel, clavardage or hameçonner,
but in the absence of a good alternative it rapidly Frenchifies English spellings, for example, turning
blog
into
blogue.
The suggestions don’t always fly, but many of their terms do take root.

Despite fears and accusations that the language law would isolate Quebec, the province has never been more open to outside influence and ideas than since it applied protective measures. Protection measures have never prevented ideas from circulating, but they circulate in French, and that was the point. “People will speak French if it is modern, if it is up to date,” says Dumas. Every year, the OQLF’s
Grand dictionnaire terminologique
(
Large Dictionary of Terminology
) receives fifty million requests to translate or verify words, half of which come from Europe. The French Academy’s website, in comparison, receives two million requests per year. Over the years Quebec’s terminologists have been so effective that they now export their know-how. Quebec was the inspiration and model for the language policy of the Catalan government in Barcelona. And the Brazilian language commission is beginning its work by examining the new ideas from Quebec, which it adapts to Portuguese when it sees fit.

We were surprised to discover that even the French look up to Quebeckers on the issue of terminology creation. This is all the more surprising because it was the French who first confronted the onslaught of English vocabulary, in the 1920s, in reaction to quickly developing and globalizing American industry and technology. In 1937 the French created the Office de la langue française, whose sole purpose was to create French terms to substitute for the English ones creeping into the language. This responsibility was not given to the French Academy, which, of course, is not known for keeping up with the times. Since then France has founded, renamed and refounded a dozen similar offices, commissions, councils, committees and agencies.

In the 1990s it finally settled for Délégation générale à la langue française, later updated with the addition of “
et aux langues de France
” (DGLFLF). Julie visited their office on Rue des Pyramides in Paris. The modern building is no match for the ornate Institut de France, which houses the French Academy, but the DGLFLF plays a far more important role in regulating modern French in France. It coordinates the work of about twenty terminology commissions in eighteen government ministries. The committees comprise professionals in specific fields—engineers or experts in trades, rarely linguists—who work on a volunteer basis to collect terminology being used from foreign languages. Language experts at the DGLFLF then draw up lists of alternatives and send them to the Commission générale de terminologie et de néologismes, part of the prime minister’s office, for approval. The approved terms are published in the
Journal Officiel.
They are obligatory only for civil servants working in the specific fields to which they apply. According to Bénédicte Madinier, head of language development at the DGLFLF, they are adopted in about seventy percent of cases. The French Academy also views the lists and makes its own recommendations. As the head of the DGLFLF told us, “They only give their opinion at the end of the process.” But Bénédicte Madinier told Julie that she was on the phone literally every day with colleagues in Quebec, looking for ideas for French terms to substitute for English professional vocabulary. “In France we don’t put nearly as much energy into translating as Quebec does,” said Madinier.

Although the French began setting up barriers against English much earlier than Quebeckers did, they have never been as effective at it, mostly because they were never as convinced of its necessity. Unlike Quebeckers, the French don’t see English as a real threat to their language—France is not surrounded by a continent of English speakers, as Quebec is. When the French do become alarmed about the influence of English, it is often an echo of foreign policy concerns. French literary critic René Étiemble published
Parlez-vous franglais?
in the early 1960s, when de Gaulle was pushing his program to re-establish France’s international status. Similar episodes occurred in the 1970s and the 1990s, for pretty much the same reasons, although it would be false to pretend that such criticisms are purposefully coordinated. Anti-English declarations usually have more to do with diplomatic strategy than language per se.

Institutional responses to the growing use of English terms in France have been mixed. In 1975 and 1994 the French tried to create Quebec-style language laws. The press and, in particular, the French left did not like the law, and ridiculed Jacques Toubon, the minister who sponsored it, by nicknaming him Jacques “All-Good” (a literal translation of his surname). France’s Constitutional Council overruled its provision that documents had to be written in French alone, on the grounds that it violated freedom of expression.

Toubon’s law is, theoretically, as global as Quebec’s French language charter, but it has serious practical limitations. The government forces public institutions and civil servants to use French, but refused to mandate the use of French on signs, although it does require signs to include French translations. Whereas the DGLFLF is in charge of terminology, inspection and policing are carried out by another government service, the Délégation générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes (General Directorate of Competition, Consumer Issues and Suppression of Fraud), which has more important things to deal with. To complicate matters more, the general public cannot file a complaint on language issues directly but must go through one of four recognized associations for the protection of language, which then may or may not take the issue to the courts. This bureaucracy is not totally ineffective, but the system of recourse is so convoluted that it discourages action and reaction on the part of the public.

Why are the French so lax about language protection? Mainly because, unlike Quebeckers, who have to deal directly with the strong presence of English speakers in North America, the French really only have to deal with the growing influence of the English language. That doesn’t mean English is not making inroads in France. The French love using English. They think that speckling conversations with English terms makes them seem modern, efficient and fashionable—in short, cool (we return to the problem of this “cool factor” in chapter 19). Over the past few years, French scientists, artists, business people and publicists have taken to communicating in English between themselves, and even with the public—not for reasons of practicality, but because it lends them a kind of panache (or, as an English speaker would say, a certain
je ne sais quoi
).

The fact is, the French don’t really see English as a threat. French is spoken by almost a hundred percent of the population (while there are immigrant ghettos in France, unlike the situation in some other European countries, immigrants in France do not really question the principle of learning the national language). The French Frenchify borrowings from English quickly and spontaneously, usually without any help from language commissions or the French Academy. An older example of this process is the French word for computer,
ordinateur.
It was a creation of IBM France, which in 1954 found it had a problem with the word
computer
in French. Said with a French accent, the syllables of
computer
sound like a combination of the two worst possible insults in the French language:
con
(cunt) and
pute
(whore). A professor of Latin at the Sorbonne, Jacques Perret, proposed the term
ordinateur,
a religious term referring to God as the one who imposed order on the universe. IBM trademarked it, but the word caught on and became a generic term.