« The more I read the Quebecois bloggers, the more I admire them. Maybe it’s the helpful latitude – long, cold winters seem to make for good weblogs (says the Vermonter). Maybe it’s good old fashioned Canadian wry humor and civility. But I think a big part of it is their ability to navigate the US and French Internet while maintaining their own perspective and critical distance. I’d be curious to hear what my colleagues up North think of all this, and find out if the language wars that turned every burger in Quebec into a ‘hambourgeois’ are now moving online. »
From Idle Words, by American blogger Maciej Ceglowski.
Dear Maciej,
I am a regular reader of your blog, which I greatly appreciate, so I got nervous when I saw that you chose to write about the OQLF incident with the Quebec Urbain blog. Yes, I admit it, I was afraid that your blog would disappoint me for the first time, because I am rarely pleased by the comments I hear or read from Americans, who generally don’t understand the politics of language in Quebec.
I am glad to say that you did not disappoint me! It was refreshing to read such a tolerant and researched perspective, and it is because I appreciated it so much that I am now taking the time to answer your call for comments on the subject.
I was born and raised in a completely French speaking environment (Quebec City) and it wasn’t until I moved to California in 1990 (and lived there until 1998) that I spoke English on a daily basis. I was in San Francisco during the 1995 referendum and I was surprised to see that some of my friends and coworkers, who were never very curious about Quebec, suddenly started to ask me questions about the political situation back home. Even the most liberal or left-leaning people seemed stunned. What on earth was going on in Quebec? Was this Parti Quebecois a right-wing party? Why would anybody want to separate from a country as wonderful as Canada? (« But, you have the National Film Board! », said a lot of my friends from film school…) I took a long time to explain to each and every one of them, to the best of my knowledge, the history of our language problems and some of the reasons for a desired sovereignty.
On the night of the actual referendum, I joined a group of expats quebecois to view the results of the vote via a satellite broadcast at Berkeley (offered by their Canadian studies program). After the stunning results– and the killer comment from Monsieur Parizeau (« How dare he! », I thought, « after all the time I spent explaining to people how this was not a racially based national movement! ») – the whole gang went out for pizza. That group of quebecois included independentists, federalists, francophones and anglophones. The conversation was animated but there were no fights, no attitude, no bickering. We were all completely moved by what we had just witnessed (a very high voter turnout for a democratic election, showing how important the issue was for all quebecois) and we felt close to one another, probably because of our expat status.
8 years later, I am back in Quebec, writing a bilingual blog. Why bilingual? Because I didn’t want to lose touch with a language I rarely spoke on a daily basis anymore (until I met my beau, an anglo from Nova Scotia), because I wanted to keep in touch with my California friends who don’t speak French and because I wanted for my blog to be part of a larger network, with more potential readers. Since I started my blog, 20 months ago, I have not received a single complaint, not even a single question from a reader wondering why I’m a quebecoise francophone writing in English. No hate mail, no hacking of the site, not even a bitchy comment. One person once told me that he didn’t like it when I switched between languages in a single post. Fair enough, I thought. When it’s English, it’s English, and when it’s French, it’s French.
The OQLF incident you talked about is an isolated one. I doubt that it will happen again, at least on private sites like blogs. I like the fact that I live in a place where there is such a thing as tolerance, a place where people can say « this was a mistake » and we can drop the subject. I’m still nervous though that the anglo press in Canada will jump on this occasion to point their eternal accusatory finger at the so-called language police, accusing once again the franco quebecois of xenophobia or even totalitarianism. But anyone devoid of paranoia tendencies will tell you that this is not the way things are experienced here on a daily basis.
So next time you’re in Quebec, stop by Montreal and hang out with the amazingly bilingual crowd of YULbloggers. I’ll be happy to buy you a hamburger, which, by the way, nobody ever seriously calls a hambourgeois.