Is Quebec English Distinct? English Usage in Contemporary Quebec Pamela Grant Université de Sherbrooke March 2010.

Is Quebec English Distinct?

English Usage in Contemporary Quebec

Pamela GrantUniversité de SherbrookeMarch 2010

Is Quebec English Distinct? Outline

1. What is Quebec English? Who is an Anglophone?

2. What is the context in which Quebec English has developed? Historical Context Canadian Context

3. What studies have been done on Quebec English ? Overview of the Literature on Quebec English Methodology and premises for this presentation

4. How is contemporary Quebec English distinct? Types of Distinct Usages in Quebec English

5. Borrowings as sites of contact and reflections of the local Political Institutional Social and Cultural

6. What are the rhetorical, ideological, and creative dynamics of English usage in Quebec?

7. To what extent are these distinctive usages considered accepted usage?

Who is a Quebec Anglophone? Criteria used

Anglophones in Quebec – 2006 Census

Mother Tongue 575,555 Home language 744,430 First official language 885,445

Total population of Quebec 7,435,905

Quebec Anglophone Population by Mother Tongue

1971 13% 1991 9.2% 2001 8.3% 2006 8.2%

Source: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada

Bilingualism Amongst Quebec Anglophones (Mother Tongue)

1971 37%

1996 61.7%

2001 66.1%

2006 68.9%

Source: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada

Contrasting Attitudes Toward Borrowing

Howard Richler: A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top.

Chantal Bouchard: La langue et le nombril: Histoire d’une obsession québécoise.

A Sampling of Non-Academic Publications

New Official Saint-Leonard Dictionary at www.italiandictionary.com

Heather Keith-Ryan and Sharon McCully; Quebec: Bonjour, eh? A Primer for English-Speakers. Bedford: Shelter and Picard, 1996.

Josh Freed and Jon Kalina, eds. The Anglo Guide to Survival in Québec. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983.

Countless newspaper articles, columns, editorials, letters to the editor….

Research: Overview of the Literature 1

Fee, Margery. 1991. Frenglish in Quebec English newspapers. Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association 15.12-23.

Fee, Margery. 1995. Using commercial CD-ROMs for dialect research: The influence of Quebec French on Quebec English in newspapers. Paper presented at 1995 Methods in Dialectology.

McArthur, Tom. 1989. The English language as used in Quebec: A survey. Occasional Papers No. 3, Strathy Language Unit, Kingston: Queen's University.

McArthur, Tom. 1992. Quebec English. The Oxford companion to the English language, ed. by Tom McArthur. Oxford University Press.

Manning, Alan, and Robert Eatock. 1982. The influence of French on English in Quebec. The Ninth LACUS Forum. Columbia, S.C.: Hornbeam Press, 496-502

Palmer, Joe. D. and Brigitte Harris. 1990. Prestige differential and language change. Bulletin of the CAAL 12(1).77-86.

Plaice, Mary. 1984. Is that really English? Actes du Colloque sur la traduction et la qualité de langue, documentation du conseil de la langue française 16.67-73.

Roberts, Roda. 1982. Frenglish, or the Influence of French on English. Les Actes du 14e colloque de l'ACLA, 203-224.

Research: Overview of the Literature 2

Jack Chambers, University of Toronto: Dialectology project

Jack Chambers and Troy Heisler. 1999. Dialect topology of Quebec City English. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 44(1): 23-48.

Charles Boberg. 2004. The dialect topology of Montreal. English World-Wide 25:2: 171-198.

Charles Boberg, McGill University

Research: Overview of the Literature 3

Shana Poplack, James A. Walker, and Rebecca Malcolmson. “An English ‘like no other’?: Language Contact and Change in Quebec.” Canadian Journal of Linguistics/ Revue canadienne de linguistique 51(2/3): 185-213, 2006.

Types of Distinct Usages in Quebec English

A. direct borrowings B. high frequency usage of rarely used

words C. semantic extensions (faux amis) D. loan-translations (calques) E. orthographic and typographical

variation F. province-specific English

expressions.

A. Direct Borrowings: Examples

dépanneur, caisse populaire, metro, autoroute, allophone, brasserie, caisse, chansonnier, dégustation, fonds, garderie, maître, polyvalent, poutine, publisac, régie, tempo, terrasse, vélo, 5 à 7

A. Direct Borrowings: Examples of Acronyms and Initialisms

Cegep, CLSC, DEC SAQ SQ OLF ZEC

A: Integration of Borrowings into English: Examples

the dep Rad-Can anglos, francos and allos the Habs the Van Doos “Caisse pops to share manager”

(headline from Stanstead Journal)

B. High-Frequency Usageof Rarely Used Words

anglophone, francophone

valorize; specificity; collectivity, population; vernissage, fête, vedette, primordial; functionary; ameliorate

C: Semantic Extensions (faux amis)

Examples of faux amis not generally accepted as native-speaker usage:

Actually (for currently) Command (for order) Conference (for lecture) Delay (for period of time) Manifestation (for demonstration) Militant (for supporter) Professor (for teacher) Security (for safety) Syndicate (for union)

C: Semantic Extensions in Transition

Examples of faux-amis in transition, gaining acceptance in Quebec

animator co-ordinates portable

D: Loan-Translations (calques)

estates general square head welcome tax single window

Orthographic and Typographical Variation

anglophone or AnglophoneQuébec or Quebec; Montréal or

Montreal14 h or 2 p.m.

E: Province-Specific English Expressions

moving day construction holiday 2½ apartment cottage confessional system ped day ROC and ROQ

Sites of Contact

« L’emprunt, en situant quels objets, quelles valeurs sont adoptées ou non, deviendrait un indicateur des zones d’interculturalité et des zones de résistance. » (Dalila Morsly, 1995:45)

Sites of Contact

Political

Institutional

Social and Cultural

Sites of Contact: Political

The set of words that has been integrated most thoroughly into Quebec English and even beyond into Canadian and world English is the set of words that deals with Quebec politics, especially linguistic politics. Because much of the debate over these issues has been carried out in the national media and by some of the most important public figures in the country, the words used are quickly disseminated and integrated into the domain of Canadian political discourse. These borrowings are signs of cultural redefinition and the linguistic reconstruction of reality, just as are the new words associated with feminism and anti-racism. These words have a perceptible effect on the relationships in related words in the existing vocabulary because they are sites of struggle for power and are deployed in different ways by different people depending on their sociopolitical context and roles. (Margery Fee, 1991:17)

Sites of Contact: Institutional

Proper names of businesses, government agencies, departments, etc.

Education: cycles; secondary five; cegep, DEC, polyvalent

Law: civil law; Maître

hôtel de ville; hôtel-dieu; palais de justice

Sites of Contact: Social and Cultural

Vernissage 5 à 7 salon du livre caisse populaire dépanneur garderie gîte guichet poutine, steamie all-dressed reveillon chum and blonde flyé, kétaine, branché téléroman

RHETORICAL, IDEOLOGICAL AND CREATIVE DYNAMICS

Complicity

Exotism

Distancing

Creativity

Complicity

All we are saying is give piste a chance. (headline from Stanstead Journal about a bike trail)

It’s a caisse of misfortune. (Gazette headline cited in McArthur 1989)

Distancing and Negative Metalinguistic Commentary

… the students won’t be in an entirely French environment and will therefore not be ‘francized’…

…so-called de souche francophones

Creativity

“In the later twentieth century and early twenty-first, literary authors are performing the act of weirding English on a political level; they are daring to transcribe their communities and thus build identities”(4) .

Source: Evelyn Nien-ming Ch’ien, Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.

Acceptability

Is this phenomenon that we are calling Quebec English evidence of sophisticated wordplay on the part of bilingual, bi-dialectal individuals, or the result of the inability of less-than-fluent English speakers to control and differentiate between two separate language codes?