opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

My confused researches on Acadia have continued, and this is what I further report back.

I remember a decade back that Joe Canadian rant ad campaign from Molson, which turned into a surprising assertion of Canadian nationalism, though it was mostly an assertion of what Canada was not (i.e. the U.S.):

It’s a cool ad, which spawned much imitation (including a fairly lame Australian instance from Foster’s—a beer no Australian actually drinks). It’s also a reminder that identity is much easier defined negatively than positively. Identity is only understood with reference to the Other—otherwise it’s the Luminiferous Ether, omnipresent and unnoticed; and the easiest thing to say about your identity, when you’re confronted by the Other, is: “That… is what I am not.”

Which led to the following exchange at Christian Rioux’s blog, when he embedded this for his Bonne fête du Canada posting:

MARTIN: Rioux, you should have called your post “I am anti-american”.
RIOUX: The original Molson ad aimed to affirm Canadian distinctiveness against Americans. There’s nothing Anti-American in that, it’s just an affirmation of Canadian identity.
MARTIN: What identity? They sell more Kraft dinners in Canada than in the USA lol.
Anti-Americanism is the core of Canadian identity.

Which is easy for Quebecois to laugh at, but (a) they’re eating Kraft dinners too, and they’re anxious about it; and (b) they’re as susceptible to defining their identity negatively as Anglo-Canadians are. And Martin’s not entirely wrong. Anglo-Canada has defined itself with a glance southward more than it has eastward. In fact, if it wasn’t for the gloriously insane folly of the Fenian raids, there wouldn’t be a Confederation as we know it.

Hold Toronto and Montreal hostage in exchange for a Free Ireland. With the States looking the other way. It was pure madness, but it gave us a cool country whose identity #1 I didn’t get to explore enough this trip (pity, it’s intriguingly close yet far to Australianhood)—and whose identity #2 is continuing to distract me.

There was a Québec counterpart to Joe Canadian, of course, Guy Québecois:

Guy Québecois is not a affectionate Quebecois caricature of Quebecois, but an Anglo-Canadian, Annoyed Editorial caricature for a Toronto radio station. (“I believe in a Distinct Society—as long as somebody else pays for it.”) But it is still a caricature drawn by someone who has at least driven through Quebec. And—albeit for their own purposes—the Francophone YouTube commenters are not objecting to the caricature. They’re either finding it funny, or yelling QUEBEC LIBRE FTW at the Anglophones. Largely in semi-phonetic spelling reflecting the local accent, because that too is a badge of identity. (With the occasional “why is noone using accents aigus here?” sideswipe.)

It would be a disappointment if the Acadians had not come up with their own counterpart to Joe Canadian, and here is Réjean Acadian, via a blogger in Nunavut. (Also here, with further commentary on Acadian identity issues in French.) It’s Chiac, so it’s only one of the several, Russian-Doll like constructions of Acadianness (on which more later); and like the other two instances, it does plenty of negative definition of identity. Here’s my misleading translation.

(English in the original italicised. Markers of distinction from France, Quebec, and Anglo-Canada indicated as ^FQC)

I’m not on stamps or welfare,
I don’t fish for mussels,
I am not illiterate or uneducated.

There is no cheese on my poutine,^Q
and my poutine is not a Russian president.

I do not live in a little shack in the bush.
I do not go to work on the 20,^Q the 40,^Q or the 401.^C
I take the Fundy Bay Drive
the Coastal Road or the Old Shediac Road.

I do not need a bib or complicated tools to eat my lobster,
I [rouve?] it on my own:
I eat it with fresh bread and Coke.^Q

I do not listen to Patrick Bruel,^F Pierre Lalonde^Q or Nana Mouskouri.^F
Real music is done by 1755, Bois-Joli, Zachary, and Daniel & Ola! [misparsing here…]
And I do not shop at Galleries de la Capitale^Q or Eaton Centre^C
but at Champlain Place and Home Hardware.

And I do not speak Quebecois^Q or France French.^F
I’m trilingual: I speak Chiac, French, and English.
And it’s “Co-cogne” not “Co-cagne” [feast].
I’ve got my own university and my own flag.
My heroes are called Antonine, Ti-Louis, and Roméo.
I’m proud of my language, my heritage and my culture.
Don’t worry your brains: even if you can take the boy out of Acadia, you can’t take Acadia out of the boy.
And the Grand Time is August 15
Not June 24^Q or July 14^F

I am Canadian^Q and Acadian at the same time.
In Acadia La Sagouine has her own land,
Bouctouche has its dune, and we have our own star.

I’m called Réjean, Freddy, Aquilla, Maxime, and Jude. And
I am Acadian.
Originally written by Jules à Hector à Eric à Cyprien à Cyprien

(Yes, I know ^Q after I am Canadian is naughty. I’m assuming the mention of Coke is aware of the Pepsi-ocracy of Quebec, which Guy Québecois mentions at the start of his rant.)

A smidgeon more ^Q and ^F than ^C in there. Which is not just Jules’, Hector’s, Eric’s, Cyprien #1’s and Cyprien #2’s bias; but after the cluestick Acajack hit me with yesterday over at AFG’s, I’ll no longer assume they speak for all Acadia. That they speak for Chiac-speaking Acadia, and that Chiac-speaking Acadia is ambivalent about Quebec—that, I find plausible enough.

Knowing nothing at all about Canada, I assumed there was a well defined Franco-Canada set up in opposition to Anglo-Canada; and I was surprised (as I’ve already blogged) that Quebec is not particularly losing sleep over the Francos outside Quebec. It turns out that, after a shortlived surge of westward colonisation, Quebec had decided by mid-century—long before the modern articulation of sovereigntism—that Quebec was the only safe homeland for French, and the Hors de Québec should be left to their fate of assimilation. Which is what’s been happening; in fact, someone has said that the real miracle is that French still does survive outside Quebec.

The bump in the story is that Franco-Canada is not only the westward colonists of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Ontario. It is also Acadia. And Acadians are not Quebecois. They didn’t come from the same part of France; they didn’t speak the same kind of French; they weren’t neighbours. It would take deliberate nation-building to get them to regard each other as the same people. But there wasn’t enough time for a nation building of Nouvelle-Francians to happen: the ethnic cleansing that turned Acadians into Cajuns saw to that. Any nation building, a century later, was oriented towards Canada, and towards getting them to regard Anglo-Canadians as the same people.

So the ideal of the Canadian Dominion was not an ideal of a French nation and an English nation making common ground. It was an ideal of Quebecois and Acadians and Upper-Canadians and Anglo-Maritimers making common ground. That wasn’t the way a Nouvelle-France identity was going to be forged; and it hasn’t been.

So if you’re Acadian, from what I gather, you don’t regard the prospect of an independent Quebec with pride and expectation, because you don’t regard Quebec as your Zion, the French Canadian homeland. You don’t, because you don’t regard the Quebecois as the same people as you, let alone more authentically French than you. You regard the prospect of an independent Quebec with alarm, because it’s going to mean the end of what little protection you have for your own language, in the context of Canada that you’re stuck in. The polls are pretty strongly against Quebec sovereignty in Acadia, and both Acadians and Franco-Ontarians make a big deal of Canada Day now. They’ve invested in the Conferederation, as insurance.

That’s what I gather anyway. The originally Acadian Acajack over at Angry French Guy—a consistently lucid and clear thinker—has several more cogent and nuanced comments than that, which also have the advantage of actually being informed: this for example. I’ve seen at least one Quebecois commenter retort the Francophones outside Quebec are stupid to trust the maudit anglais to respect their language. Maybe they are. But they’re still not making aliyah.

So I’m on Angry French Guy’s blog today (as I have been a lot recently), and I come across his posting on how there is excellent Francophone music which does not get enough respect in Anglophonia, dammit. One of the featured bands, “Straight Outta Moncton“, was Radio Radio, who rap in Chiac—the mixed English/Acadian of Moncton youth. AFG commends the rhyming potentialities of Chiac, and reassures his Anglo readers that no, the Quebecois don’t understand what they’re saying either.

Here’s their hit Cliché Hot, with subtitles; and you know what? I don’t think Acadian poses as much of a challenge to me as Joual. Yes, I know it’s Chiac not Acadien pur, and there’s a lot of English in there. But the French substrate is certainly enunciated more leisurely, and I didn’t think the vowels were anywhere near as unrecognisable. That may be a SW vs. NW France thing, given where the original colonists came from.

Oh, and it’s a fun boppy piece of hip hop. As phallically driven as non-political hip hop usually is; but being XY-chromosomed myself, I shrug that off; the five or six different incongruities in the verse Arrache ta ch’mise bitch, t’es cliché hot (“Take off your shirt, salope, you are stereotypical chaude“) amuse me more than anything else. And there’s a lot to be said for macaronic verse. It gave us Stetit Puella in the Carmina Burana: it can be sublime:

Stetit puella
bi einem boume
scripsit amorem
an eime loube.
(See David Parlett’s translation)

Or it can be a phun phat beat:

Now, the fact that Acadians and Quebecois don’t regard themselves as the same people doesn’t mean they aren’t talking to each other, or even that they don’t regard each other as cool. At least one Quebecoise cites Radio Radio on their MySpace pages. But plenty of Australians cite Crowded House on their MySpace pages too, and that goes towards confirming Acajack’s contention: Acadia to Quebec is like New Zealand to Australia—or Canada to the U.S. To Quebec, Acadia is cool, quirky, a cousin, but not the same; ditto Quebec to Acadia, but (I surmise, Acajack didn’t say so) with the added discomfort of being towered over.

I wikipedia’d around Radio Radio, and failing that, Chiac. Which led me to the animated series Acadieman: Le first superhero acadien.

Acadieman illustrates some of what I’ve just been saying, I think. I know that I am a Australian anglophone with no knowledge of the local subtleties and a knee-jerk defensiveness towards federalism, so I have no right to make any conclusions about how Acadia ticks from five minutes with an animated series. But:

• It’s not just the English bits of Chiac that I’m finding easier to understand than the Quebecois accent: I was basically following the French bits too. And that certainly doesn’t happen for me with continental French.
• For jollies, there’s an episode (Series 3 Ep. 5) where a starstruck Acadieman asks comediènne quebecoise Pascale Bussières: “I hear you guys speak something like our Chiac… Joual. Could you speak some?” Until this point, Pascale has been speaking the mellifluous Parisian of Radio-Canada; but she’s game, so sure, she’ll speak some Joual.
  Sænte-Fwè Booport Tcharlesbourg, Lorettzville Vaniarr Sænt-Augustzin-de-Desmaures Læc-Sænt-Tchar-les!!!!
  It was like I was back at Aerodrome Dorval. Could not understand a solitary syllable of it.
• The proud use of Chiac on Acadieman is in itself a political statement. Chiac is bastardised French, just like Cajun is, and it’s a portent of the Anglification of Moncton. The French teachers of New Brunswick are dismayed by the show, and they’re not unjustly dismayed: what’s the point in the only Francophone university outside Quebec being in Moncton (unless Sainte-Anne counts too), if Acadieman proves Monctonians can’t speak proper French after all. The Quebecois know that if they didn’t enact Bill 101, their French would end up a folkloric exhibit like Cajun; Acadieman’s Chiac may make some of them feel vindicated. And Acajack, touched by the use of Chiac in a song not by Radio Radio, still says:
  

  Of course, I am enough of an armchair student of linguistics to know that chiac is a dead-end street for francophones in that part of the country.

• But Acadieman’s creator knows why he’s using Chiac, and defends it in his blog: he’s asserting a Moncton identity, not a Quebec City or a Paris identity, and he’s attracted interest from sociolinguists for it. He also winks at the language paranoia in the series: in Series 3 Ep. 10, Acadieman is out of town—and away from his corrupting influence, his friends find themselves drifting into français de Rive Gauche.
• The plot of Season 3 is an Acadian Götterdämmerung: it’s played for laughs, sure, but it does illustrate some of what I’m surmising. Quebec secedes; America invades New Brunswick; the Acadians are driven to the woods in the second round of New Brunswick ethnic cleansing. These are the darkest fears of Acadia, put on the screen for Ha Ha Only Serious laughs. It strikes me that at least some of those darkest fears are shared with Anglo-New Brunswick: that the Acadians see the world at least partly with Anglo-Canadian eyes. Chiac isn’t just about language.
• Which makes me gasp at some of the lampooning of Quebec that Acadieman does. It’s not Anglo-Canadian Letter to the Editor, We Pay Too Much Money For Bilingualism lampooning; it’s not Why Does My Chips Packet Have French On It lampooning, of course not. But it’s certainly not deferential either. The faces on the new Quebec dollar (Series 3 Ep. 8) were South-Parkian in their cheek: Celine Dion, poutine (Quebec variant), Réné Lévesque complete with cigarette in his hand, that Hockey Team mascot I never did work out; and on the QUD 1 bill: Charles de Gaulle.
  Not because Acadians think the Quebecois are Francodules. But because de Gaulle made the speech on the Montreal town hall balcony, that legitimated the whole turn of events…
• (Do I have to gloss “Francodules”? I see it’s been used once online before now. Cf. iconodule: a slave to Frenchness.)
• Oh, and this is a silly thing to say, but: there was a clear sense to me that French-speaking Montreal was a foreign place to un anglo comme moi. Duh. But anyone who drops anyhoo into his version of French, like Acadieman does… I find it a lot tougher to consider him un étranger. 🙂

When the Parti Québecois was first elected, Réné Lévesque (possibly with cigarette in his hand) exulted: “Maybe we’re not such a little people any more. Maybe we’re something of a great people.” And the struggles in Quebec before and since have been the struggles of a great people or two, epic and animated and momentous.

The struggles of Acadia are not the struggles of a Great People. A Great People sends men to the moon; a Humble People worries about his house burning—a metaphor I take from this clip of an Acadian in 1967, complaining that Quebec separatism isn’t doing anything to help the survival of Acadian French.

I’m Australian and not a Kiwi, I’ve lived in the US and not Canada, and Greece and not Cyprus. Still, I find something… sympathetic about the fate of being a Humble People. So long as a humble people manages to hold out, there’s a greatness in that too.

Now that Quebecois have noticed my blog, I’m going to have to post eventually about what I don’t think they should secede. That’s going to be a hard post to write, given that

• (a) it’s none of my maudite business;
• (b) the ideal that I defend in my head, like Ramsay Cook does, inherited from Lord Acton—of an equal partnership of nations making common ground in the same state—has not been the reality of the history of the Canadian Confederation;
• (c) those partnerships rarely work out equal anywhere;
• (d) I’m seeing little evidence that the Franco-Quebecois are invested in the partnership any more, whether they can be bothered or not to go to the next step of sovereignty; and
• (e) the majority of sovereigntists are not the caricatures used to scare small children and National Post readers.

To elaborate a little on the last bit: a review of Ramsay Cook’s Watching Quebec says that he makes the mistake of demonising all nationalisms, and not recognising that some of them can be progressive and civic, rather than ethnicist and reactionary. To put it more obtusely: there’s not just Hitler Nationalism, there’s also Obama Nationalism.

Funny thing is, in one essay Cook says that Trudeau had the same kind of blinkers on (although Cook and Trudeau were fellow travellers in federalism, so Cook didn’t really say that was a bad thing). To Trudeau, nationalism meant only the reactionary Duplessis, he could not see that it can also mean the liberal Bourassa. To Cook, nationalism meant only Hitler (and he admits it in his introductory essay); he could not readily see that it can also mean Lévesque. Or that, even if Bourassa and Lévesque did good things for the people, and disclaimed any Kempek Gallôn Katholikôn rhetoric, that the threat of exclusion was not inherent in nationalism.

(Oh, sorry for that lapse into Greek: my Greek readers know what I’m alluding to. For the rest: the slogan of the April 21 dictatorship in Greece was the unreconstructedly nationalist Hellas Hellenôn Christianôn “Greece of Greek Christians”. And this was forty years after Greece had already been made monolithically Greek Christian, and twenty years before migration would start challenging that.)

The Parti Québécois is not following the rhetoric of ethnic exclusion, except in the fevered imagination of Anglo-Canadian opinion columns. The world has changed, and Canada has changed, even if the Balkans have not: you can’t make ethnic purity a condition for citizenship. The identity PQ is defending is a linguistic one; and in fact Cook diagnosed the shift of rallying point at the time quite astutely.

In the nineteenth century, Franco-Quebec was defined by its creed and its bonds to the parish and the soil. By the mid-20th century, Franco-Quebec was urbanised and secular, and looked like anywhere else in North America (though maybe with a generation’s delay). The only thing left distinguishing it from Anglo-Canada was its language, and that’s what it had to defend. Which is why Quebec welcomes francophone immigrants. The point is not that they’re born eating poutine and swearing “tabarnak”. The point is that francophone migrants will more easily learn to eat poutine and swear “tabarnak”. Or to put it less stupidly, that they can more readily acclimatise to a civic identity which centres on French, and which has identity markers that can be acquired, rather than bequeathed as an ethnicity.

So the PQ brand of nationalism welcomes Haitians: I have no problem believing it does so sincerely (the world has changed and so has Canada), and the PQ can’t hope to win government if it doesn’t. The PQ brand of nationalism tries to embrace anglophones, and makes the 24th of June a National Holiday, rather than a Patron Saint of French Canadians Holiday: it cannot get a contemporary nation happening with a Catholic Saint as its patron. It’s a nationalism, but it’s not an ethnically based nationalism.

That doesn’t mean that Anglo-Quebecois see themselves as welcome in the PQ. They vote against the PQ monolithically, something that has generated much discussion over at Angry French Guy’s blog. A language group voting 97% against a modern civic party is not democracy, it’s Stalinist, the opinion goes. They’re the responsible left-wing party, and an Anglo-Quebecois can support them too, AFG says (before saying he won’t, for reasons of his own):

The Bloc can’t make Québec an independent country without another referendum. You can support the Bloc without supporting sovereignty. Don’t let your Canadian nationalism stand in the way.

Well, maybe; but I do get why the Anglo-Quebecois as a block reject sovereignty. (As a block, of course: there are exceptions who don’t immediately reject it, and Angry French Guy interviews them, but we’re talking statistical abstractions here.)

“Join with the Franco-Quebecois in partnership to build a nation?” They did that: it’s called Canada. The Canadian partnership didn’t work out, because the Francos were the minority? But why would the Anglos want to sign up to be a minority themselves? As a commenter pointed out (can’t find it), that’s not Stalinism; that’s self-interest.

That’s the bind: Canada and Quebec compete for allegiance. Because of how history has flowed, there are Franco-Quebecois who are still committed to the Confederation—or at least, who don’t think it worthwhile to break from the Confederation. Because of how history has flowed, there aren’t a lot of Anglo-Quebecois who see why they should be Quebecois first rather than Canadian first, if being Quebecois makes them a minority. And I say that without being dismissive: my first instinct is to agree with them, after all.

I was misled on my first day in Montreal by the streetscape molded by Bill 101, into thinking that French had won and English had acquiesced. So long as Quebec remains in Canada, there will be a motivation not to acquiesce. Some say sovereignty will solve that; I’m not convinced, and I’m not convinced the centralist motivation not to acquiesce—to look to Ottawa instead of Quebec City—is illegitimate.

But the only way to safeguard French in Quebec is to keep doing what the PQ—and the Liberals—have been doing in Quebec: make French *the* vehicular language of a nation, rather than of an ethnicity. The anglophones may never vote for independence; but more of them are interacting in French on the streets of Montreal. Not enough perhaps, but more. All things considered, that’s no small feat.

As always, the commenters at AFG who actually know what’s going on there have more insight into Quebec Civic Nationalism than I can hope to from downtown Melbourne—and in a better thread than most…

[EDITED for barbaric spelling “quebecquois”]

I’m back in an implausibly cold Melbourne Town, and I haven’t been blogging my experiences in Canada live as they were happening. That’s always a high risk venture: on the one hand, I’m far enough from the actual experience to smudge it round the edges, and come up with something less accurate and more entertaining. On the other, I’m far enough not to bother coming up with anything at all.

There will be a post or two (so long as I can still be bothered) ruminating on federalism vs. sovereigntism in Quebec. As I hinted in previous posts in situ, the issue poses me a challenge: enough so that I spent quality time over the weekend there, when I should have been exploring even more of the Latin Quarter or venturing out to Deepest Darkest Westmount, reading the local blogs instead, or Ramsay Cook‘s take on Quebec history. The convenient thing about that is, it saved me interacting on a substantive level with any real live Quebecquois. I did talk briefly with a local involved in my workshop, who gave me some “I’m not a separatist but” insights. But tapping into blogs allowed me to mainline the political currents at little risk to life and limb.

OK, I don’t think I was actually at any risk of life or limb. Except if I kept eating poutine. Put on almost 2 kg in 10 days. They really do eat like North Americans there. That was my first eye-opener that no, this was not France: they may not all want to make common cause with Anglo-Canada, but they still have a lot more in common with Anglo-Canada or the States than with Vieille-France.

The other thing they do differently than France is French; and because Quebec French was the highlight of my last day in Canada, and I suffer from recentism, that’s what I’m writing about.

My French is not good. Three years at school, awful Greek-derived accent (my uvular fricatives are all velar, my vowel quality is shot); mediocre production, abysmal comprehension. To contextualise the anecdotes I’m about to relate: in the first week a few of us (a Franco-Quebecquois and a Franco-Belgian and me) went out for beers. When the prospect of Belgian beers came up, I said ingratiatingly, ça va sans dire! The Franco-Belgian, seeing an opening away from English, responded:

FRANCO-BELGIAN: Ça va Liège Bruxelles Gand Anvers Charleroi!

NICK: …

What he said, in response to my “it goes without saying”, was simply “it goes even better when said.” In a quite reasonable normal everyday continental French accent, since noone has spoken Walloon since 1926 or something. But faced with one subordinate clause, and I’ve forgotten my own name.

Which means that Francophones, like Germanophones, have to switch to English when I’m in earshot. In fact, when two other workshop participants thought I was out of earshot, they switched back to French. I tuned back in, and interjected a pertinent comment in English; by now they knew how crap my French was, so they switched back to English.

That, ça va sans dire, is awful and hegemoniacal and lazy of me, especially since I’ve been an Esperantist; but living in Oceanic Monolinguia, I don’t particularly have opportunity or motivation to do any better. Well, strike “opportunity”. In fact, having worked for five years in the School of Languages, University of Melbourne, strike it with a two-by-four.

Given the linguistic sensitivities of Quebec, my franco-failings struck me even more than usual. I was halfway convinced Angry French Guy would hear me imposing English on whoever I talked to in a shop, and mow me down with his Eighteen Wheels Of Justice Dix-Huit Roues de Justice. Of course, I already have an out from the Rules for Linguistically Negotiating Montreal, which Angry French Guy has formulated himself, by being a dumb anglo tourist. But being a dumb anglo tourist *and* a kneejerk supporter of federalism, I knew I had to earn my out.

So I wore my Deutschland football cap everywhere, and initiated conversations in French, um, a third of the time. Although I had not read Angry French Guy’s formulation of the Rules beforehand, I’m not surprised that a German cap on its own would have gotten me dispensation. OTOH, my French may be wretched, but it’s not Anglo-wretched: it’s Greek-wretched. Anglos are frustrated trying to practice their French in Montreal, because Montrealers hear their ‘Allo ‘Allo vowels, and respond in English. More often than not though, I did *not* get le switch: people in the service industries responded in French. (Although I’ll note, le switch did happen more often when it came time for the bill.)

At the beginning, my French was limited to taxi drivers, who tended to be Africans or (I’m guessing) Haitian. That meant their French was (a) close to the continental standard, and (b) slower and more painstakingly enunciated, so I came perilously close to actually having a conversation with them at least once. Thanks to that, I can report that Montreal does indeed have a bed time, but that bed time is 3 am—and you can still find a feed after midnight if you know where to look. Thank you M. le taxi driver, though I’ve got amends to make to my diet.

Now, Quebec’s accent is not the continental standard. Not at all. I already knew about oi being pronounced archaically as [we], but that is certainly not the only thing different. In fact, had I looked up why the local variant of French is called Joual (or read the archives of Language Hat), I might have been more steeled for what I ended up hearing.

Still, by the last few days, I felt confident enough not to initiate le switch in my interactions with people who looked plausibly like speakers of more Quebec-inflected French. Er, you know. Um, white Montrealers. (Yes I know. I’m sorry. But you know why I’m making the distinction, and *I* know that within a generation, the distinction won’t be there.) And when I did speak French with them… when I did, I wish they would initiate le switch after all.

It was embarrassing, it was mortifying, it sucked, and it assaulted my self-image as cool languagey person—as if that self-image hadn’t taken enough of a battering already. We do the phatic exchanges, we’re sticking to French, I’m happy that I’m not being a maudit anglais… and I realise to my horror that I do not understand a single word I’m hearing. Yes, I didn’t understand the subordinate clause from the Franco-Belgian either, but at least I recognised that what he was speaking was French. When the Montrealers started using subordinate clauses at me… I could not even tell they were using a Romance language.

Oh, Joual? It’s the Quebec pronunciation of cheval. That’s right: /ʒwal/ < /ʃəval/.

I was so screwed.

As a cool languagey guy and all, I am happy that Quebec has its own language norm, and that language diversity survives, and that it’s escaped the Parisian steamroller that’s killed off the Walloon of Liège and the Francoprovençal of Geneva and the Breton of Brest. It’s great, it’ll keep linguists at Montreal U in employment, it’s a welcome instance of a pluricentric language other than German. (English is pluricentric too, but without the language academies and authorities that you can pinpoint in French and German.)

… Still. I was so screwed.

1. UPS EQUIVALENT

My travails started my last morning in Montreal, when I was trying to mail a book to Toronto. I declined to use French in the hotel (because settling my bill was complicated enough), but I did leave with a parting merci infiniment, and I was primed to redeem myself in francicité. Maybe not with the hotel staff (who were wonderful: Montreal Holiday Inn Midtown, I recommend it), but certainly with everyone else I was going to bump into that day. For mailing my book to Toronto, I was directed by the helpful hotel staff to the local UPS equivalent, Purolator, Cnr University & Cathcart. (Not Canada Post, but a private mailing company: again, they really are North Americans here.) The dude at the UPS equivalent was serving people in alternating English and French; despite my German cap, I was going to try to stick to French, and make good.

NICK: I would wish to mail this to the Toronto.

UPS EQUIVALENT GUY (French): You’ll need to fill in that form.

OK, that’s going well. Form. Right. I can do this. But, how much will it cost?

NICK: It will cost the how much?

UPS EQUIVALENT GUY (French): Ti-Pet Ti-Poil Boubou Patapouf envelope is free.

NICK: ….

UPS EQUIVALENT GUY (French): Sherbrooke Gatineau Lesage Lévesque.

Actually, no, that isn’t doing Joual justice. The vowels are different, and the diphthongs are way different, and the consonants are different enough—so representing a Montreal French accent with random Quebec placenames and personalities isn’t going to cut it. It was more like:

UPS EQUIVALENT GUY (French): Sharbroke Gætinoo Lesarzh Levæck.

NICK: …

UPS EQUIVALENT GUY (French): …

NICK: …

UPS EQUIVALENT GUY (English): It costs 20 dollars.

NICK (French?): Oh. Um… you are not the having the something the more economical?

UPS EQUIVALENT GUY (English): [teensy bit exasperated] More economical? No, that’s the minimum cost.

By this stage, I am freaked out. Freaked out that I have presumed on this good Montrealer’s patience. More freaked out that he’s asking me to fork out 20 bucks to mail a half a kilo of paper to the next province. I’d like to think that the implausibility of $20 was got in the way of me parsing what he had to say. I’d be wrong, because when plausibility gets in the way of me understanding German, at least I still recognise it’s German.

*Flashback: Vienna, July 1995*

NICK: [at McDonalds] (German): Please to give to me one Happy Meal.

McDONALDS DUDE: Would you Donauschifsgebot Kärtner car?

NICK: (que?) I… came to here from the Salzburg, by the bus.

McDONALDS DUDE: No, would you Donauschifsgebot Kärtner car?

NICK: But… I am not wanting to purchase an automobile?

McDONALDS DUDE: [rolls eyes] [pops onto counter McHappy Meal toy McCar]

NICK: … oh! Yes sir please, I will to take the game car with the Happy Meal.

*Flashforward: Montreal, July 2009*

NICK: … [takes form to fill out]

…

NICK: [exit stage right, pursued by Eighteen Wheels of Justice]

The pattern was set for the day.

• Slight mishaps would befall me,
• I would freak out.
• I tried to speak French,
• and through no fault of my interlocutors, would freak out when I didn’t understand what was going on.
• And the next time a mishap befell me, I tried speaking French again,
• rinse and repeat, atoning in my own misguided way for the Plains of Abraham.

2. In Search of Canada Post

My next mission was to find a Canada Post office, because damn me if I was going to pay $20 in French to ship a book to Anglo-Canada. This meant I had to find someone willing to tell me where the nearest Canada Post was, without me accidentally launching a new Quebec referendum.

To the reader’s surprise, I managed to do so three blocks later, without switching into English (or phrases any longer than 6 words long). To my surprise, I did so on Réné Lévesque St, of all places—which is much more of a feat than back when it used to be Dorchester St.

NICK: (French) One ice cappucino please. And that please.

[Plonks oatmeal cookie onto counter, thereby avoiding having to work out how to say “oatmeal cookie” in French]

CAFE COUNTER CHICK: Is that all?

NICK: Yah.

CAFE COUNTER CHICK: Five sixty.

NICK: Please, you know where is the Post Canadian?

CAFE COUNTER CHICK: … Sorry.

HELPFUL ELDERLY QUEBECQUOISE: They have an office in Pharmaprix.

NICK: …

Five seconds later, once I’d worked out that Pharmaprix was not another random Quebec placename, but the pharmacy I walked past three buildings ago, I was set, and walked out with renewed purpose and a spring in my step. And an oatmeal cookie.

The spring in my step didn’t last long: as I headed back towards Pharmaprix, I was accosted in French by an random vocal dishevelled someone or other:

RANDOM VOCAL DISHEVELLED SOMEONE OR OTHER: Would you Groulx Bourassa Trudeau Duplessis?

NICK: [back to panicked] Nonononono [Heads in opposite direction]

RANDOM VOCAL DISHEVELLED SOMEONE OR OTHER: Sir! St Urbain St Denis Ste Catherine Câlisse!

I think it’s great that Montreal’s panhandlers (or homeless, or insane, or whatever the dude was) feel confident enough in their language to accost tourists in French with German soccer caps on. I think it’s great in the abstract, at least. In the concrete, I went round the block, and the blocks on that side of downtown Montreal are sizeable enough to work through an ice cappucino…

3. Canada Post

Once I made sure the random vocal dishevelled someone or other was nowhere to be seen, my venture into Pharmaprix was much less eventful, and indeed close to a success:

NICK: (French) I am wanting to post the this book to the Toronto. [Takes envelope, attempts to weigh book]

PHARMAPHIX POSTIE: Yes, you can write on that envelope, and pay at the end. [Those weren’t the scales]

NICK: [writes address] … I am not knowing the postage code of the address.

PHARMAPHIX POSTIE: You can look it up here. [Points to ginormous compendium of Canadian postal codes]

NICK: [Wow, you mean each apartment building on (STREET NAME CENSORED), Toronto has its own post code? No wonder the compendium is so ginormous]

PHARMAPHIX POSTIE: Is that everything?

NICK: Yes thanking you.

PHARMAPHIX POSTIE: $7.70.

NICK: [Now that’s more like it.]

PHARMAPHIX POSTIE: … Plus taxes, plus the envelope.

NICK: [Crap.]

4. Vieux Dublin Burger

$10.40 to mail half a kilo of paper to the next province is still too much in my book. But the book was mailed, and I was now in search of repast. Not that I was remotely hungry, but I had a couple of hours to kill before heading to the airport, and I was flying back cattle class all the way. Freaked out aplenty by my misadventures to date, I made sure I made like the readers of the anglophone Montreal Gazette, and retreated to Deepest Darkest West Montreal.

Well, not that deep; I never made it to actual Westmount, where the Anglo money had its mansions, and which Réné Lévesque memorably compared to Rhodesia. I *did* however end up at Le Vieux Dublin Pub, and I figured that at worst, I’d have to dredge up the two words of Old Irish I learnt twenty years ago. And try to avoid saying póg mo thóin.

And yet… I was *still* trying not to be an anglais maudit. Even in Deepest Darkest West Montreal:

REDHAIRED VIEUX DUBLIN WAITRESS: Bonjourhello.

NICK: (French) Bonjour. You are accepting the cards of credit?

REDHAIRED VIEUX DUBLIN WAITRESS: (French) Credit cards? Of course.

NICK: OK. I am to having the… Boddingtons, one pint, and the cheeseburger.

REDHAIRED VIEUX DUBLIN WAITRESS: Which one?

NICK: Um… the McGillucuddy, please you.

BRUNETTE VIEUX DUBLIN WAITRESS: [To REDHAIRED VIEUX DUBLIN WAITRESS] (English) *** [No idea what she head, I was just relieved to hear English]

NICK: (English) [A little *too* eagerly] Oh! It’s safe to speak English then.

[Man, it’s a good thing I’m flying out in four hours. They’re going to tar and feather me, the way I’m going.]

REDHAIRED VIEUX DUBLIN WAITRESS: (English) Oh, I can speak French, English, Spanish, and a little bit of Polish.

NICK: [Man, think of lighthearted repartee, quick]… ¡Para yo, no entiende español!

No, that wasn’t the right answer. The right answer, of course, after a morning mangling French, was that I should also mangle the Polish counterpart of Happy Birthday, which is all the Polish I know. (“Sto lat, sto lat, Niech żyje, żyje nam”.) Under the circumstances, that was probably not all that much more right an answer.

The Old Dublin is a pleasant enough quiet pub with not much of a view, but did not stay empty and quiet for long: in ten minutes, it was packed out with the entire business community of Montreal at lunch, and with more lunching done in French than English. The burger wasn’t the burnt paragon of beefitude I had been craving (I forgot to say brulez ça SVP.) But then, I was in North America.

5. To the Aerodrome

I lingered at a café for another hour, reading the local street press. More Two Solitudes: there’s a vibrant Francophone band scene, and a vibrant Anglophone band scene, and they aren’t intersecting. At least they’re both reviewing the same crap Hollywood movies.

I ended up back at the hotel, picked up my luggage, and into my shuttle van to the airport. I had now switched into English with the driver, but this did not prevent the shuttle van stranding me at Montreal Central Bus Depot. I had negotiated the shuttle bus with the concierge in my native tongue, but I’d failed to catch that crucial detail. I’d also failed to catch the other crucial detail, that the shuttle van did not take credit cards. This may have been correlated with me ending up stranded at Montreal Central Bus Depot, not entirely sure.

By the time I understood why I was there, I’m missed my connection to the airport, and was waiting another twenty minutes for the next. That’s fine, I still had a little while left, more than enough to down an ice cream, and negotiate the automatic ticket machine.

AUTOMATIC TICKET MACHINE: (French) …

NICK: Not noticing an English option. Yeah, this is a service provided by the province of Quebec alright.

AUTOMATIC TICKET MACHINE: (French) Please choose your destination.

NICK: *button C*

AUTOMATIC TICKET MACHINE: (French) Please indicate number of passangers.

NICK: *button A*

AUTOMATIC TICKET MACHINE: (French) Please insert credit card for preconfirmation.

NICK: *inserts card*

AUTOMATIC TICKET MACHINE: (French) *thinks*

AUTOMATIC TICKET MACHINE: (French) Your purchase has not been confirmed. Please proceed to the counter. *Expectorates receipt*

Ah, another mishap. Maybe the machine can’t deal with credit cards with chips in them, so they take signatures at the counter. Yeah, that must be what it is.

The woman at the counter is of a swarthy complexion, which as I had already concluded (yes, I know, I know) meant to me that I should default in French—and that I had a good chance of understanding her in response.

NICK: (French) I am not the certain what has taken place, but… *shoves receipt across counter, it will be more eloquent than me*

BUS COUNTER WOMAN: Your card has been refused.

NICK: … Oh?

BUS COUNTER WOMAN: [circles *Card Refused* on the receipt]

Oh, that’s what that meant. Yeah, I did just pay 10 days’ accommodation on the same card; that might have done it. Ah… *rummage*

NICK: You accept the card American Express?

BUS COUNTER WOMAN: [accepts the card American Express] Where are you going?

NICK: The aerodrome. Dorval.

The official name of the aerodrome is Pierre Trudeau, but the airports are federal territory—and I hadn’t noticed any streets in Montreal named after Trudeau. So I’m guessing (correctly) that the airport name is Ottawa tweaking Quebec’s nose, and I’m avoiding repeating it to the locals unnecessarily.

BUS COUNTER WOMAN: [hands over ticket]

NICK: (Wuh? That was quick! … She must have done this before.)

BUS COUNTER WOMAN: Your bus departs at half past two, at platform SEVenTEEN.

[Enunciating a little too clearly, even for someone who doesn’t look like a stereotypical joual speaker. Not that I’m complaining by this stage. Or indeed any stage.]

NICK: … Seventeen. Thank you.

It’s a big queue at platform 17, Montreal Central Bus Depot, and the two American students in front of me have a heckload of luggage. But I’m trying to humble myself down to cattle class.

Some humblings, though, I’m unwilling to truck on company time. The bus rocks up around 14:35, and the long queue of passengers rustles into action. And waits. A few minutes later, the driver (or what looks like a driver) turns up at the front of the queue.

DRIVER OR WHAT LOOKS LIKE ONE: (French) …

NICK: (This… is not going to be in English, is it.)

DRIVER OR WHAT LOOKS LIKE ONE: (French) The bus Maisonnevv Closse Jænne-Mænce Cartiærr inspectors Celine Dion Stephane Dion will not depart Canadiæns Alouettes inspection Place d’Ærmes Place d’Ærts next bus will leave at 15:00.

I think I know what’s going on; but since I’ve already paid my money with the card American Express, I’d like confirmation, before I go off to make alternate arrangements. So I look up expectantly, and so do the two American students in front of me.

DRIVER OR WHAT LOOKS LIKE ONE: (English) Euh… The next bus, leaves at three.

… Right. I fly at half past five. Taxi!

6. To the Aerodrome, Seriously This Time

Taxi:

AFRICAN TAXI DRIVER: (French) Let me help you with that. Where are you going?

NICK: (French) Dorval aerodrome.

The accumulated weight of the McGillucuddy burger, the joual-induced stress, and colonialist’s guilt made me sleep through the trip to the aerodrome. When we alighted to the aerodrome, I produced my credit card so I could be on my way. This time, I had not asked beforehand whether the taxi accepted cards of credit, so…

AFRICAN TAXI DRIVER: (French) No, I can’t.

NICK: Um… *rummage* … The American Express?

AFRICAN TAXI DRIVER: Uh… No sir. [gesticulates towards his obvious lack of credit card facilities in the vehicle]

NICK: Ah. This is the problem. There is the Automatic Teller Mechanism inside?

AFRICAN TAXI DRIVER: Yes, there’s one back there, near the Air Canada terminal. I’ll park just in front there.

NICK: Yes. I will revert here in the soon.

A couple of minutes of panicked search ensue. Then…

NICK: Behold, sir. How much.

AFRICAN TAXI DRIVER: [English] Forty five dollar.

Dude, I feel your pain. Really, I do.

7. Checking in at the Aerodrome

So, that’s done. Now to get my seat on the flight to LA.

I choose to be checked in by a human being and not a ticket machine, because I’m transiting through to Melbourne. And I choose to be checked In French. Because I never learn, and because I still have an inflated idea of my linguistic abilities.

The woman checking me in is a Mme Trudeau. Given my Trudaeuolatry, this is all the more reason to try in French.

Mme TRUDEAU: Bonjourhello.

NICK: (Um, am I really going to do this?…) Bonjour.

Mme TRUDEAU: (French) Where are you travelling today?

NICK: Melbourne. With the transiting to L.A.

Mme TRUDEAU. So… you are flying to New Orleans?

NICK: No, the Los Angelès.

(Or maybe that misunderstanding happened in English, one level of security further along. Anyway.)

Mme TRUDEAU. Ah. One piece of luggage?

NICK: Yah.

(Mme Trudeau spends a couple of minutes investigating my ticketting situation, and has a quick exchange with a colleague in English.)

Mme TRUDEAU: [Pushes my ticket to me and huddles towards me—the way people in service industries do, when they need to explain something complicated to you, that will involve at least one subordinate clause.]

Mme TRUDEAU: (French) Right. Montréal Quebæc Gatsinoo Sharbrouc Trwè Riviàres Sænt-Djan-sur-Richelioo. Sænt-Hyacænthe Jolietts’ Rouÿn-Noranda. Salaberry-de-Valleyfield Alma Val-d’-Or Sænt-Djorges Baie-Comoo. Septz-Îles Riviàre-du-Loup Amos. Matæne La Tsuque Dolboo Lachuts’.

NICK: …

I was dumbstruck. Her lips were moving, but I could not understand a solitary syllable of any of it.

Mme TRUDEAU: (English) … It’s better in English?

Right. Think of something suitably apologetic and humble to say.

NICK: (English) I’m sorry, I haven’t learnt joual.

… That may not have been it.

Turns out my flight was overbooked, and I’d have to renegotiate passage at the gate. Well, OK, I could do that.

But I was astonished that, all of a sudden, a veil had come over my ears. I think part of it was that Mme Trudeau’s accent was a little stronger than the UPS Equivalent guy’s. One of the Anglophone Angryphone thugs commenting over at Angry French Guy’s blog described Joual as quack-quack-quack-tabarnak. I in no way endorse Angryphone thuggery, and I have the highest of respect (in the abstract) for Quebec going its own linguistic way. (More respect than the Office for the French Language in Quebec does, which tries to keep Quebec French as close to Paris French as possible, outside the accent—and the English loanwords.)

Still, Angryphone ghastly thuggish stereotypes of what a language sounds like do come from somewhere; and the [æ] of the Quebec accent was quite noticeable. (Especially for what in Paris French is /ɛʁ/.) The “tabarnak” comes from somewhere as well; but again, Montrealers were consistently much nicer to me than I deserved, so I did not directly experience the fine panoply of sacreligious swearing that Quebec has to offer. With the possible exception of that panhandler or homeless person or whatever he was outside the Pharmaprix.

8. Having Checked In at the Aerodrome

I wasn’t quite out of the woods; I still had to clear security. This time, I knew to take of my jacket, so avoided my previous day’s embarrassment, when I’d flown to Toronto.

*flashback: Day Before*
NICK: [Takes both computers out of carry-on luggage]

SECURITY GUY: Padlikid?

NICK: … ?

SECURITY GUY: Pas de liquides?

NICK: Euh, no, no liquids.

SECURITY GUY: Anlevrlvest SVP?

NICK: (Whatever that is, I’m sure I’m not carrying any of that, either.) Nononon.

SECURITY GUY: Enlever la veste, s’il vous plaît. (Mimes taking off jacket.)

NICK: Ah, le vest. [Takes off jacket]

It’s lovely of me, in a cloth-eared pointless kind of way, to respect the Francicité of Quebec by misunderstanding simple instructions and staring blankly. I’m not as sure that the security queue at Trudeau Aerodrome was the right place to do it.

Transiting through to the States meant security was a little patch of sovereign American territory, with American security procedures. The flight was slightly held up, the airport staff to process us more so; by the time I noticed the airport staff, a sizeable queue had already formed. A couple (en anglais) was being referred to the staff’s supervisor, with apologies which I thought too leisrely placed given how soon the plane was supposed to leave. (The staff knew more than I did at this point.) While the woman of the couple was on the phone with the supervisor (and the man of the couple was off fuming to one side that the supervisor was not there in person), the queue grew, and people weren’t being processsed in an obvious way. The guy two people behind me bounded forward after five minutes (en anglais), to ask why the queue wasn’t being reduced.

I would not add to the staff’s trouble by arrogating Anglais to myself. Assuming the staff was a francophone, and I was already addled enough not to be sure any more. So I didn’t *arrogate* Anglais to myself, exactly; but I did insinuate it: I drifted into French more tentatively than before, and I mostly got English in reponse.

AIRPORT STAFF: (English) … Would Business Class be OK?

NICK: … Ça plane!

As I waited to embark, the big screen TV was running ads for the upcoming gigs in Montreal, with the kind of inflection I normally associate with Monster Truck shows. (I am in North America.) “Coldplay! Et Beastie Boys! Le promiàr et dezziàm Oût!”

Emperors get to place themselves above grammarians: when Lucius Mestrius Florus pointed out to the emperor Vespasian that a wagon is properly pronounced plaustra, not plostra, Vespasian retaliated by calling Florus “Flaurus” (φλαῦρος, “worthless”). And Florus had to acknowledge the emperor’s sparkling wit if he knew what’s good for him. Vespasian’s vernacular pronunciation won out in the end: we say en Anglais /ɔːˈɡastəs/ for his colleague Augustus, for the same reason. (Well, *I* do. You may say /ɑːˈɡʌstəs/ or something.)

But in revenge for Florus’ snub, French has kept chewing away at the emperors’ phonemes, especially when the emperors named months after themselves. Old French was already down from Augustus to Aoust; then the s went, leaving only a circumflex as its calling card (Août); then the final t, with the general massacre of consonants in French. Augustus is now already down to /aˈu/ in Paris. Now the final indignity to Augustus: his eight phonemes in Quebec are down to one. Oût. /ˈu/.

I mean, ç’est cool, that’s what language does. But not all languages their nouns down to a single letter like French does. French reduced hodie to hui, and had to repair it as au jour d’hui. I wonder if Joual-speakers somewhere are already coming up with au mois d’août.

I did not have the presence of mind by this stage to take my ruminations that far; oût was one more oddity to trip me up by now. Classe d’affaires means you get to board at leisure, and board at leisure I did. As I left Quebec, I thanked the staffer for the upgrade:

NICK: (French) Thank you immoderately!

AIRPORT STAFF: (French) I have placed you in a very good seat Mr Nicholas.

NICK: It is the… er, day… day of good fortune for me!

AIRPORT STAFF: Duplessis Godbout Sauvé Barette Lesage!

NICK: … *smirk* *waves*

I think I’m starting to get Montréal enough to get my anti-seccesionist resentment on again. Not by talking to the locals: I don’t much, and when I do, they are perfectly courteous and pleasant.

Like the guy I just bought my replacement camera from. I did stampede the conversation into English, because I was buying a camera and not a shawarma, so I needed to know what was going on. And I didn’t think my attempts to inject some soupçons of apologetic French were that convincing. But after I said I was un touriste d’Australie, I did smile when the camera store guy asked “did you learn French here, or down there?” Zut, I should hope your French courses for foreigners aren’t as crap as my French would indicate.

He was also surprised I had heard of Avril Lavigne. (She’s doing an ad campaign with Canon, and because of her red is the default colour camera they sell—I bought red anyway). Quebeckers (or at least Franco-Quebeckers) love Quebec cinema, and Quebec music: it’s their music and cinema, and it isn’t American. They loathe it (so my guidebook says) when the only Quebec music anyone outside Quebec notices is whatever’s in English (and Céline Dion). But Avril sings in la langue maudite; surely it’s not that surprising I’d heard of her?

I now am attuned enough to my surroundings to notice that some of the English I hear around me is Anglo-Quebecquois, and not just lost tourists from New Brunswick. In fact, I’m even starting to notice a little bit more English around me in West Sherbrooke than Sherbrooke Est. But no, it’s not my scattered interactions with the locals that inform me on secessionism. The garbage bins post boxes do a bit:

But my main source are the local blogs I’m dipping into; and my “Screw Secessionism” reaction came to me when I read a French blog post grousing about the temerity of Ottawa, festooning Red Maple Leaf flags around Old Montreal during the 400-year anniversary of the founding of the city. Dude, you ain’t seceded yet. You’re still in Canada. And 1608 matters in the history of Canada, not just the not-yet Republic of Quebec. It’s not as if there would have been a shortage of Blue Fleur-de-Lis flags in Place d’Armes. For bonus points, the rejoicing that les Quebecquois stopped calling themselves Franco-Canadians after the Quiet Revolution. (The post responded to, I found a lot subtler and less knee-jerk, and I commend it to you.) I get the impression the Francos of Ontario don’t figure prominently in the secessionist imagination. Like, say, Avril Lavigne.

What I find interesting though is that blogs are a way of breaking down the Solitudes. There’s still plenty of resentment to go around. But at least Dans le Palais d’Enkidu is commenting at No Dogs Or Anglophones. He doesn’t agree with a lot of what No Dogs says—in fact, he draws attention to it on the few occasions he does. But he doesn’t have to agree: at least they’re talking. Andy Riga’s “Franco comme moi” experiment, to confirm whether you couldn’t get any service in French on the West side of town as the Franco press claimed, was condemned by some readers as sensationalist. I think it was intriguing, and something that presupposes a breakdown of the Solitudes. After all, the guy’s kids do go to French school by choice, not compulsion: he’s writing for the Anglo paper, but he’s committing to the city’s Franco future.

Likewise, Angry French Guy is taking it upon himself to give the Angry Franco-Canadian answer to the anglos’ posturing on their home linguistic turf. He doesn’t have to be Placid Loyal Federalist Guy; that he’s going across to the anglos’ turf to be Angry and French is itself a huge advance. (Btw, he may be angry, but he’s also thoughtful and engaged, and I commend him to you too—somewhat embarrassed at my own anti-secessionist bias.)

And mea culpa, AFG: I did not assume there were actual Language Police guys with truncheons and measuring tapes (though as you admit, it’s a compelling image), and I’m happy to hear that less than 5% of all complaints to the Language Police appropriate provincial body result in followup. On the other hand, finding out that no shop could display anything but French at all until 2003 is something I find unforgivable enough to stick with the disparaging term. But thank you for the context anyway.

It will be even better if a Mec Anglo Colère is doing the reverse on French linguistic turf, or No Dogs is yelling in some secessionist blog’s comment section en français. For all I know, that is happening. It should: Bridging the Solitudes, Briser les Solitudes should be happening at both solitudes. And even if Quebec does become independent, the Solitudes will be bridged. You’ll still be stuck next to each other, you will still end up talking. Which is for the good.

Une notice bref à vous informer that I am still zombified from my travel to the other side of the world—although decreasingly so: I managed to wake up at 6:30 AM today without also having woken up at 5:30. The weakness of the unexpectedly North American coffee here (you mean I’m not in Lyon?) is not helpful. I’m zombified enough that spelling quebecquois as *quebecquois did not give me pause. (There, that’s addressed John C’s two comments.) I mean, oi is already pronounced /wa/ (or here, /wɛ/ ), so the <q> is still followed by a /w/ in -qois, right? No? No…

I’m also zombified enough that I’ve lost my camera. Unfortunately for you, not before I took 350 shots, and some of them will make it to this blog yet. Not quite sure how and why, but I think Vieux Montréal Rousse beer and a shallow jacket pocket were involved.

(Old Montreal Red doesn’t come in bottles apparently; it was on tap at the Holiday Inn bar. Rich and ale-y. Molson, OTOH, may be a national icon, but it was meh as lagers go.)

My journalistic imperative dictates that I purchase a new camera before I go to Toronto—indeed, before the weekend: I’ve got twins to shoot. Buying a camera in a city frequented by tourists is not, of course, the most cost-effective thing to do; but one suffers for one’s art. And so will you, gentle reader, so will you…

Montreal, you are multitudinous like the sea—or like your weather. Every five minutes’ walk, you turn into a different streetscape, with quirks its own, with charms its own, with colours its own.

Most of which work for me, especially because this time of year there’s no snow to burrow under, and no black ice to trip me.

I have even more photos to cull after Plateau Mont-Royal, the implausibly photogenic high-tone neighbourhood of townhouses and iron grills and flowers. Yet here, I will not show you snapshots of Plateau Mont-Royal. I will show you snapshots of the linguistic conflict, which I still don’t get, but which provides me much divertissement nonetheless.

I assume that ecclesiastical establishments such as the People’s Church are exempt from the Language Police strictures. Quebec already knows it has a publicity problem with its language policies. (Hint to the Quebecqois wikipedians: appealing to the parallel of Estonia, after the whole Unknown Soldier conflict, is not the most strategic of illustrations.) The last thing the Language Police needs is to spread the conflict into the religious sphere.

Still, the People’s Church, even if it is in deepest angloest West Montreal, looks monstrously out of place:


St George’s Anglican Church, even deeper in deepest angloest West Montreal, has taken no such chances:


The notices may be in English for an Anglo congregation, but Église anglicane is on top of everything else.

Of course, St George’s is overshadowed by the scale model of the Vatican that is the Basilica Of Mary Queen Of The World.

It makes sense for St George’s to announce itself to its bulkier neighbour in the neighbour’s language.

The federal army also appears to be exempt from the language police:


At least, they’re exempt until the next referendum, when once again the Canadian Air Force will discretely jet its planes out of the province to avoid them becoming bargaining chips. But the next referendum is a long way off; and meantime, JOIN THE FIGHT is decidedly larger than COMBATTEZ AVEC NOUS, right?

One of the more disconcerting things about the Montreal streetscape (thank you Wilbert for verbalising it for me) is that many of the buildings (especially in deepest angloest West Montreal) are Victorian in a way quite familiar to a Melburnian—but they’ve got French superimposed on them. Like the Royal Victoria College:


Or the High School of Montreal:



Or the kicker, a plaque informing the locals of the identity of une certaine Reine Victoria, next to her statue in the eponymous Square:


And if you want to find out who this certaine Reine Victoria is en anglais, you can good and go to the web site. (That’s standard practice for Montreal landmark captions.)

Victoria OWNED this town when the statue was built. You can tell from how many statues of her there are in Montreal, and throughout her empire. Now, she has to be glossed to Montrealers in French, as the daughter of Guillaume IV, presiding over the expansion of the empire brittanique. And when you say empire brittanique in French, it sounds like Quebec was never part of it. Of course, it sure isn’t now. Banknotes notwithstanding.

But statues in Montreal are in a dialectic. Glossing Queen Victoria in Square Victoria is fitting payback for the inscription on the Place d’Armes monument to de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal. This is where Montreal was created, this is where the heart of French Montreal beats, M. de Maisonneuve and his cohort proudly facing their creation in Notre Dame.

A marvellously vivid statue, dedicated by the grateful citoyens de Montreal. In English.

There are other reminders on the streetscape that this is French-in-North America, not France. Beside the size of the restaurant servings. For example, NASCAR is quite loaded politically in the States, as an activity of the American, English Spoken Only heartland partakes of, and the Coastal Elites deride (though they may not be all that more multilingual). So I was thrown to see NASCAR turn up in Lyon-on-the-St-Laurent:

Bilingualism can be harmful to your traffic flow. This, near the entrance of McGill University:

Apparently a merging lane for Anglos and Francos.

Dorchester Square, the centre of Montreal Downtown, is now Square Dorchester. It is also closed for refurbishment, so I did not get to inspect its Victorian statuary. I did however get to inspect the outward facing French announcement of its contents:


“1800 geraniums! 240,000 granite paving stones! 1 Victorian Square!” (I’m now wondering whether “Victorian” is a code word.) “1.5 km of granite edges! 1 Scottish Poet!”

… Rabbie Burns, you used to be a default fixture in any large city square in the British Empire. You’re now a long way from hame…

Rue Ste Catherine is the shopping mecca of Montreal. Or at least one of them. It features a FCUK store. Now I’ve always thought FCUK were TWATs (Trendy Wankers, Acronymically Tendentious), who should instead be hawking CNUT (Couture Nouveau, Urban Trends). But curiously, FCUK (French Connection) here announces itself as French Connection (FCUK):

Once again, I don’t know what subtlety I’m missing. The Idiot Acronym would be lost on Franco-Montrealers? The anglos are using an excuse to flaunt the Language Police with prominent English (and FCUK isn’t English)? The parent company is trying to ingratiate itself with Franco-Canadians (and avoid a bomb) by emphasising how French they are—in the wrong language?

Chains from out of town doing business must adjust to the realities of Montreal under the Language Police. Such as avoiding apostrophes, a topic for another time and another blog. Booster Juice, launching Açaí on an unsuspecting populace, duly Francifies BRAZILIAN POWER, and TRY IT HOT, and BRAZILIAN STYLE:

They’ve left in “All Rights Reserved”, but at least that’s in small print. They’ve also left in AH-sci-EE as the pronunciation key for this exotic Brazilian condiment. As a result, Franco-Montrealers are going around ordering /asiˈe/ instead of /aˈsajiː/. This wasn’t the only American pronunciation key in advertising that I’ve seen left as is in French. I’ve got to wonder whether Franco-Montrealers by now expect pronunciation keys to be en anglaise maudite, regardless of the containing language. I would.

The Montreal Jazz Festival, of which I caught all of ten minutes of, is a drawcard for jazz aficionados (and not-so-jazz aficionados), from throughout the world. Including the English-speaking world. OTOH, it is the *Montreal* Jazz Festival; so it has to represent Franco-Montreal.

Which means the programme—

has to cater for both fr and en:

But fr and en is not all that is spoken in Montreal. The reality of modern multiculturalism (which Canada pioneered) is that you will see other languages on the cityspace—although the French language planners have correctly identified that the allophones will eventually pick one or the other. There was outroar when the Language Police started going after Hebrew being more prominent than French. I think the Arabic here is the same size as the French, but it’s a difficult decision to have to make:

It’s been 200 photos on Sunday, and I’m daunted about how many I’ll actually end up posting. Last time I went photo-berserk, in Berlin, I left it so long I lost interest. So I need to be posting the quirky photos and quirky mistaken observations on Montreal language politics close to the source.

But I’m still adjusting my biological clock: fell asleep at 9 PM (the Hefeweizen helped), woke up between 1 AM and 3 AM but couldn’t concentrate enough to write anything. And I’m here on business: the reports home take priority. There also is a priority on experiencing things to blog about, over blogging them. (Hence the Hefeweizen.)

It’s 8 AM, I’m in the hotel lobby cafe, because I will not face another hotel breakfast. The first shock in coming to Montreal is, what is this piece of France doing in North America. The second shock is, despite the Language Police purge of English from the streetscape, this is still North America. Witness (A), they serve food like North Americans. I thought I was striking a blow for frugality by having a single scrambled egg and bacon for breakfast, instead of the mountains of meat, egg, potatoes, and bread that the hotel menu was defaulting to. What I got still had the mountains of potatoes and bread. I’m not noticing the lather of maple syrup on top of everything yet, but I may be in too internationale an establishment. But the servings were just as ginormous outside the hotel.

This morning was yoghurt granola in a plastic cup, thank you very much. And the granola was still suspiciously sweet.

Sunday was probably an optimal time to be out and about in town: it rained yesterday and again this morning, so those 200 photos may have to last me a while. I ended up doing four of the walking tours in the guidebook; I turned back tired before I could start the fifth, up Plateau Mont-Royal. A workshop participant is offering to take me up there this afternoon; haven’t decided yet—I am here on business, after all.

As I really should have known, I was naive to trust the language-purged streetscape of Montreal, to work out how the language conflict has played out. I only know a bit more now than 36 hours ago, but the conflict is not yet done. I’d mentioned that I saw red at reports that the current governor general had once toasted secession; but Michaëlle Jean has been doing the right thing since appointed GG, including (a) getting up PM Stephen Harper’s nose, and (b) making it her mission to bridge the solitudes between the two communities. I mention this, because the one thing I did work out in the past 36 hours is, there is still a force field between the communties.

In fact, I was fooled by the language police into not realising that I’m staying at the fault line of the force field in Montreal. West Sherbrooke St was Anglo where rue Sherbrooke Est was Franco; because of the language purge and the mellowing out of tensions, I assumed that was all ancient history and the split down Sherbrooke didn’t matter. The workshop I’m attending is at UQAM (Université du Quebec à Montréal) on rue Sherbrooke Est, and I certainly didn’t notice a border checkpost or a force field in the 1 km between them.

But there is a force field, as betrayed by a remark from a UQAM staff member, as I went into the sights I’d seen in my Sunday reconnoitre: “oh, I don’t know West Montreal that well”. That’s West Montreal, 1 km away. Or, to take a different example, in one of the many skirmishes between the anglo and franco press in Montreal, on slights real or imagined, the Franco opinion writer wrote that the anglos have abandoned their “flegme brittanique”, and are on the linguistic warpath. I know Anglo-Canadians are as subdued as you’re going to get for North Americans. But lumping them in with Britons? That’s what people look like from one solitude to the other across an force field…

Because I hadn’t noticed the force field, I think I mistook the Square Golden Mile utterly. The Scottish-named cross-streets may not be relics but holdouts. The Winston Churchill Pub where I had mon diner (that’s lunch in Quebecqois, not dinner) was not a quirky name choice, but a counterassertion of brittanicity. (With a lovely terrace.)

Which gives added dimensions to this photo, on a swanky fashion shop on West Sherbrooke.

The way I’d read the display, Garance Doré may be a French fashion house which the trendy quebecqoise adorent; but Montrealers still caricature Parisians with berets and baguettes, just like the most clueless of Americans do. This heartened me: it told me that Franco-Quebec asserted a Franco identity rooted locally, not pleading for direction from the metropolis. That they could poke fun at Paris, instead of prostrating themselves before it.

I think my take is basically correct: after all Quebec prides itself on having a more purist French than Paris does, so they are more Catholic than the Pope. And being more Catholic than the Pope is not a sign of venerating the Pope. There’s an obvious reason why Quebec needs to be purist in its French, and deride France for allowing le parking into the language. The encroachment of English into France is still mostly a matter of wounded prestige; the encroachment of English into Quebec is closer to a matter of survival.

Of course, Quebec service staff still respond to merci bien with bienvenue!, which is that most American reflex response you’re welcome! in French clothing. But that’s the thing about purism: it’s all about the morphological clothing, not the calquing. Just as when the Greek purists thought they could help revive Ancient Greek (as Psichari memorably lampooned), by rendering French journalistic clichés like prenant en consideration que or entre la poire et le fromage or tous proportions gardées in Greek with Classical genitives.

But the fashion display with the berets and baguettes was on the anglaise maudite side of the force field. Was this a franco shop, gently reminding the world that it was not prostrated towards Paris? Or was this an anglo shop, subverting the requirement that Nous adorons has to be double the size of We love? Much harder to tell.

Oh, and I’m occasionally averting le switch in my interactions with the service industry. But my understanding of spoken French is even more sluggish than my understanding of spoken German (though my German is worse); and the Quebecqois diphthongs are not helping…

It’s now close to 4 PM, and I’m in a brasserie next to Notre Dame, about to start my third walking tour of Montreal for the day, following the prescriptions of the Lonely Planet guide. I like this town. I’ve barely spoken to anyone; and le switch that the local francos make to English, when they work out that you’re (a) not a franco-quebecqois, and (b) not an anglo-quebecquois, means that I may not get much of a sense of the town.

I hadn’t realised last night that the cab driver sticking to French despite my obvious discomfort was exceptional by local norms. That he was African may explain that he had different norms on le switch. The other unrepentant refusal to do le switch was from the guy tasked with searching bags at the entrance to the Jazz Festival, who I’d ignored.

GUY TASKED WITH SEARCHING BAGS: Monsieur? … Monsieur. … MONSIEUR!
ME: … Urk?
GUY TASKED WITH SEARCHING BAGS: Arglé barglé tabarnac your bag câlisse!
[No, I don’t think he was actually swearing. But the whole quebecqois sacreligious swearing thing is funny, and I’ll come back to it.]
ME: [opens bag] I am having the portable computer, and the…
GUY TASKED WITH SEARCHING BAGS: Euh bien, allez. [Waves arm to shoo me away. Or to indicate that lots of nations are taking part in the fireworks competition, I haven’t worked out the subtleties yet.]
ME: [goes] *So he didn’t get to see my guide book. Probably just as well*

But walking around Montreal is leaving me with good vibes. Enough that there are dozens of photos, which will have quite a lag being annotated and posted here. There’s at least four different towns in the 4km I’ve walked so far, and I’ve loved three of them. (The edgy hip street keepin’ it real bit left me cold.) The surprise to me in walking was, how I reacted to the language conflict in the public face of Montreal—and that it wasn’t the response I expected.

I react harshly to separatism. Harshly enough to surprise me. I’m not going to justify it, but there it is. I think it’s an ingrained reaction from my Greek schooling, Greece having learned at the feet of France to suppress expressions of minority identity. So I growl when Catalonia gets its own .cat Internet suffix, because they don’t want to be in .es (while Asturias just buys .as domains off American Samoa.) I snarl when Montenegro want to have their own Wikipedia, before they’ve even formally defined their own language. (And I’m not more charitable about the fact that The Language Formerly Known As Serbo-Croat is now going to be four languages, and not just three.) And it always gives me material to grouse about when in Belgium, since clearly noone there has any investment in a centralist notion of Belgicity. It would have been fitting if I could turn this French-inspired centralism, and applied it against French Canada. Boorish and superficial, true, but fitting.

I was all prepared for my centralist reaction, and may have it yet in the ten days I’m in town. I’d been prepped up about it by my contacts with Anglo-Canada in the ’90s, when Quebec looked like seceding. I had two British Columbians, who I knew to be sober and sensible folk, independently assert to me in ’99 that the country was heading for civil war. I’d seen the polls that Franco-Quebeckers would vote for the premier a woman, an immigrant, someone gay—anhyone before they’d vote for an anglo. I’d had the centralist visceral reaction already, when I read the accusations in Wikipedia that the current governor general of Canada had toasted Free Quebec. I’d rolled my eyes at the Quebecqois Language Police, getting out their measuring tapes to make sure the French signage on shops was always larger than the non-French signage—and the kerfuffle when the fines for non-French signage started including Hebrew. And I’d been regaled with third hand tales of the resentment Anglo-Canadians had over the enforced bilingualism, however far away they were in Canada from Francophonie:

ANGLO-CANADIAN FRIEND OF FRIEND OF FRIEND, IN AUSTRALIA: [drunk] [picks up packet of chips] You know… what I like mosht about thish packet of chips?
FRIEND OF FRIEND: What?
ANGLO-CANADIAN FRIEND OF FRIEND OF FRIEND, IN AUSTRALIA: [drunk] … There’sh no fucking French on it.

And yet, I’m not having my centralist reaction at all. It’s partly because I’m too out of it and alien to pick up on the signals of language conflict; so much so, the language-agnostic bonjourhello that service staff use here (because you can’t be too careful) is something I find amusing, not dysfunctional.

But partly, I suspect, I’m not having my centralist reaction becuase it’s no longer all that dysfunctional. The Language Police and their measuring tapes have won. The Anglo-Canadians who did not flee after the referendum have made their peace with the fact they’re no longer running Montreal. They accept French as the default public language (at least, so the guidebook says), and in a generation or so, they may even switch to French completely—like the Flemings of Brussels did, and indeed like the Irish of Montreal did before them. The city gives off the confident assurance of being majority French: it’s not yelling it’s French, it’s not trying to prove it with fisticuffs that I could notice. I didn’t get the immediate sense it felt threatened as much as it used to by the Anglicity outside Quebec.

I don’t know how accurate that impression is at all, and the No Dogs Or Anglophones blog suggests there’s a lot more to the anglos’ side of the story. It’s been a long time since the FLQ was murdering people, and a shorter time since the 1995 referendum on independence; but I’ll stick with that impression for now.

What is striking walking around the city, is that it clearly was not always so. The money and power in Montreal 50 and 150 years ago was Anglo, and did not let you forget it. Montreal was a loyal British town (or at least that was the narrative the public face of Montreal pushed out): there were statues of Queen Victoria, and statues of Robbie Burns, and British Lions, and lots of unchallenged English signage. And there were lots of streetnames that would not look out of place anywhere in the Empire—especially around the Golden Square Mile, where I’m staying. The cross-streets of West Sherbrooke St: Union, University, Mansfield, Metcalfe, Peel, Stanley, Drummond, Bishop, Mackay. There’s a Drummond St three streets up from Melbourne Uni; there’s a rue Drummond here.

But there isn’t a Drummond St here. In fact, the Language Police have won so thoroughly here, that the British street names look now like antiquated, unthreatening markers of a remote and irrelevant past. Like the Amerindian names of New England, or the occasional indigenous place names in Melbourne. Maybe even like the prehellenic names of Greece. “Corinth was not originally a Greek name? You don’t say. Well, I don’t see any Pelasgians claiming ownership of it now, do you?”

Just as I’m not seeing anyone saying West Sherbrooke St, instead of Rue Sherbrooke Ouest. The only witness left that the Language Police haven’t seen to is a ’30s apartment building on the Golden Square Mile, whose owners had the English street name carved in as a monument for the ages, in the ages before the Quiet Revolution.

And the only evidence for East Sherbrooke St (which was not as Anglo) is this street sign—inexplicably not replaced like all the others.

“Street” has been whitewashed away on this sign, but “E.” is still placed where French will not place it.

I’m sure neither the Canada at War image I’d painted in my mind is accurate, nor the Montreal At Peace image is. I’m sure there’s a lot more conflict in bonjourhello than I’m picking up. But it’s time to go on walking tour #3 now, and take in the statuary of Notre Dame.

(Oh, and there’s a lot of delightful Frenchness about the town, but the coffee is still North American crap.)