Frenchville, PA: a distinct dialect of North American French

This is not about Quebec or Acadia, but this is where my North American French stuff goes, so: in reading a book on Prince Edward Island French,

King, Ruth. 2000. The Lexical Basis of Grammatical Borrowing: A Prince Edward Island French Case Study . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

—I've come across a mention of Frenchville, PA, settled in the 1840s, which appears to have retained a distinct dialect of French into the 1960s.

As Ruth King says, there have been no studies on it apart from a glancing mention in a 1973 dialect survey; and Wikipedia does not even know Frenchville exists (it's now part of Covington Township, Clearfield County).

At any rate, I've now added a paragraph on Frenchville to Wikipedia's French language in the United States article. Frank Merat, an Electrical Engineering professor from Frenchville, has the most material online on the village. And I haven't sighted Haden's 1973 survey, although I don't think it'd say all that much.

I assume it's safe to go to Frenchville without a shotgun nowadays...

Weekend Acadians

I've left this post so long (a month!), it's funny; funnier still that I've already said much of what I was going to say in it, in the preamble that ended up as a separate posting. Still, I'm reaching the end of my current backlog of Canadiana—and I'm not finding Angry French Guy's latest inspiring enough to provoke more this fortnight. Besides, as my Gentle Readers remind me, it's more interesting when I write about something I know about, than about something I don't.

So. When I was quizzing Acajack about the complexities of North vs. South New Brunswick Acadians, he brought up another phenomenon, somewhat related to it. My query was about more vs. less assimilated Acadians, and how the tension between the two makes the concept of Acadianness itself up for debate. Acajack brought up the extreme outcome of this debate: fully assimilated Acadians, and whether they can set the agenda of Acadianness on their unassimilated counterparts.

Acajack is delightfully level-headed and well-informed. That's not to say he doesn't have a bias; sure he does, it's impossible not to have a bias about these things. This post is particularly maladroit, in that I accept his report of what has happened, but I don't like his reading of it. That's maladroit, because he's there and I'm not, and he knows what he's talking about and I don't. In all likelihood, he's right, and I just don't want him to be right.

But I'll reproduce the chain of facts he reported first.

• Acadianness traditionally has been about speaking French. In fact, the French-Canadian identities have long centred around speaking French, especially once Quebec went urban and secular. (I don't know whether the Acadians have gone as urban and secular; I suspect not.)
  
• Chiac to my ears is still basically French. It's self-consciously bad French (the phone number for the fictional Chiac pour les dummies is 1-800-PARLMAL [TALKBAD]), but it's French. So Chiac vs. Acadian does not illustrate the division I'm about to get into, but it informs it.
  
• The Acadian World Congress convenes every four years, to bring together the Acadian diaspora. (Of course diasporas can have diasporas of their own.)
  
• The Cajuns are descended from Acadians, so they should be involved at the Acadian World Congress.
  
• A lot of Cajuns no longer speak any French—Cajun, Acadian, Chiac, Joual, or Rive Gauche. They're proud of their Cajun heritage, but they speak English.
  
• This is awkward to Acadians, because they have defined themselves in Acadia as the French-speakers, and the Acadian World Congress was a place where it was safe to celebrate French-speaker–hood. But eventually they relented: the Cajuns could come, even if they didn't speak French.
  
• The debate about whether to allow English in the Acadian World Congress would have been informed by the split between North and South New Brunswick—Brayon land and Chiac land. In the south, where French is spoken by a third of the population and not 98%, Acadian identity is constructed differently, and does not necessarily assume speaking French as definitional to it.
  
• That contention came up in the forums of Acadieman (Acadians debating a Quebecois on the appropriateness of promoting Acadia through a Chiac-speaking slacker, rather than a more "authentic" Acadian).
  
• Canada has assimilated anglophones of French-Canadian origin. Not a whole lot in Quebec, but a lot of them in Rest Of Canada, including New Brunswick.
  
• Anglophones of French-Canadian descent are vehement in asserting anglophone identity: Union Jacks, portraits of Queen Elizabeth, letters to the editor about Quebec. [I could have put that in the opinion column, but I don't see a reason to contest it.]
  
• So there are anglophones of Acadian descent. To be contentious, I will call them Anglo-Acadians. (It should be obvious why that's contentious.)
  
• After the Cajuns came to the World Acadian Congress, Anglo-Acadians turned up to Acadian cultural events, and wanted to be involved.
  
• They did not speak French.
  
• They did not learn French, and did not believe they should have to speak French, in order to be involved in Acadian cultural events.

The extra opinions Acajack contributed to that skeleton are:

• In the South, being Acadian is becoming a heritage identity, and marginalised ("ethnic"), rather than a hegemony and default identity, expressed in French ("social").
  
• In the south Acadians know a lot of anglophones, and a lot of anglophones of Acadian descent—some of them are their family members. Which is why South New Brunswick is more sanguine about Anglo-Acadians.
  
• The Anglo-Acadians started showing up to Acadian events because the Cajuns made it cool to.
  
• The Anglo-Acadian participation is superficial, because they're unwilling to make the extra effort of learning French: they're engaging on their own terms.

That's my summary, but you can check it against the original.

All this is plausible; the last bit bothers me. In fact, I went fishing for the last bit, because it bothered me, and got Acajack to restate it explicitly.

On the one hand, it makes sense that Acadian events should be a safe haven for the French language, particularly in the south. Acadians are entitled to be annoyed at violating that safe haven, when the focus of their identity is language. That kind of censure is commonplace; I'm reminded of me rolling my eyes at Greek-Americans, or the next generation of Greek-Australians, who cannot speak Greek. I'm reminded of the Esperanto censure against "crocodiling".

"Crocodiling" (krokodilado) is when someone in an Esperanto club uses a language other than Esperanto. (I was going to say "uses a natural language", but it'd be just as applicable if you started bellowing Klingon drinking songs. taHjaj wo', ghuycha'!) Of course, you'll likely be using the local vernacular when you do crocodile, so it's not like the communicative function of language is not being met. But the image is apt of a crocodile, chomping up the safe haven. This is Esperanto territory. Speaking English there profanes that.

So from that viewpoint, I'm with the Acadians. (Or, if I'm being obnoxious, the Franco-Acadians.) Moreover, it's not like the Anglo-Acadians have a clean slate: they assimilated, they overtly sided with the colonialist. And Acajack did use the term "sold out" (= vendus) at one point, though apologetically, so he does have his own reaction to that. There are reasons why the unassimilated kin of the Anglo-Acadians look on them with suspicion.

On the other hand, the Anglo-Acadians are not walking into a solid, "icitte on parle Joual" Quebec. (Not that even Quebec is that solid.) They're walking into a debate between north and south, on whether language is the definition of Acadianness. And I'd imagine the south takes their side. And for better or worse, the Anglo-Acadians will now contribute to the debate; just as the Cajuns did. Long-term, maybe for the worse, maybe New Brunswick turns into Maine. Maybe Prince Edward Island already has.

(I've borrowed a book on Prince Edward Acadian phonology, coz it was in English, and had a sociolinguistic preface. I'll report back on what I find. And yes, I can read French, but only if I absolutely have to, and the books the library had on Quebecois and Acadian were not fascinating enough to compel it.)

There is something superficial about rocking up as a weekend Acadian. Given the past, there's something ungracious about it. Yet I still think Acajack's take is unsympathetic—though I admit, I goaded him into it. You can construct a more sympathetic take: the Cajuns raised awareness among Anglo-Acadians of Acadian cultural functions. They already knew they existed, but the Cajuns gave them a hint they might be welcome after all, even if they didn't speak French. And they went along, cluelessly, without enough humility or atonement, without knowing that really, they were walking into a safe haven for Acadian French. (And more damagingly, from what Acajack reports, without wanting to realise it when they did walk in.) But I'm not convinced that they didn't go along sincerely, and I'm not convinced that they don't belong there.

I think Acajack's take unsympathetic, mainly because I wasn't thinking only of Esperantists or Greeks, but also about the Irish. And Australian Aborigines, who have had their language taken away from them, and who all too frequently react with discourses of purity, and reject those insufficiently like them. As I have meandered elsewhere.

It's not the same as Acadia, not at all; that's just my wires getting crossed. The pain of the Irish or the First Australians is real enough to be debilitating; the Anglo-Acadians surrendered their language long ago, get hegemony out of it, and now just show up to Acadian do's on the weekend. Maybe they just did it because the Cajuns Made It Cool; but after all the history of Anglo-French relations in Canada, how Cool can it really be to be an Anglo-Acadian? Maybe, I surmise, there's a pang there as well, in some of the Anglo-Acadians, of what they have lost. I'm not there, I don't know anything about it; but maybe there's some of that.

I'll close with something ungracious, and then try to make up for it. I was catching up on Angry French Guy past postings, because I'm not finding the latest batch as interesting to me. Acajack said something that stopped me in my tracks, that explains Australian multiculturalism, but that I think also illuminates what could happen in the Acadian identity debate, now the Anglo-Acadians have claimed a seat at the congress table.

And this is why people of diverse origins who have come to live among us are the real instigators of change. They are the ones who diversify the definition of what it means to be Québécois by defining the Québécois identity as their own. In a sense, they *force* the majority into it.

Faced with so many people with various degrees of melatonin (thanks Fon, I love that formulation) who claim to be Québécois (or whatever… Canadian, American, etc.), the majority is coerced, often subtly and unknowingly, into altering its definition of the “national” identity.

First... wow. That's so spot on.

Second: It's ungracious to use the rhetoric of an inclusive Quebec against the survival of Acadian distinctiveness. In fact, it's inapplicable, because Acadia is not a nation the way Quebec is. The most gracious I can get, to make up for it, is to admit that the sentiment is right for Quebec and Australia, but will probably destroy Acadianness (at least in the south, where there are Anglo-Acadians precisely because Acadianness is more precarious there). And there, it should be—not combatted exactly, but guarded against.

Maybe get that guy to write Chiac pour les dummies after all...

Acado-Russian Dolls

It's true, the initial obsession with Franco-Canada is somewhat wearing off; it was remarked at the pub last week that I went a full 20 minutes without mentioning Quebec. Because my downtime has been taken up with adventures in the language of War of Troy and Chalcocondyles (of which more at The Other Place), I haven't delivered yet on the postings I've already pledged; so I'm catching up summarily.

The grand emotive defence of multiculturalism I was building up to may not end up here, because much of it ended up as a comment on Angry French Guy's blog. The thread ended up substantive, even if people kept their own perspectives (and I think I was the only one close to saying multiculturalism is good in its own right). It was a thread substantive enough to draw approving comment; in no small part because it didn't get the attention of the resident fanatics.

So that doesn't go here. But several weeks back, I had a couple of exchanges with Acajack on Acadian identity, both driven by me trying to get the context behind Acadieman. Round about here.

"Acadian" is not the terminus of identity construction in New Brunswick francophonie: things keep being layered and nested there. That explains why in Series 2 of Acadieman (which is not online), the war is not between Quebec and Canada or the US and New Brunswick, but North New Brunswick and South New Brunswick. It also explains why the roving news reporter of TV Acadie in the series does *not* codeswitch into English—and sounds like he needs a volume control.

Now, identity is a messy construct. What you are is defined by what you're not, and there's a whole suite of criteria you can use to define yourself against Y, and with X. If things go smoothly, you end up with a concentric sequence of identities, some of which are more important to you than others, and most of which define a hierarchy of people you feel kinship with. I will now self-indulgently illustrate with two sets of identity I can lay claim to.

• I'm Animal, You're Vegetable Or Mineral
  
• I'm Human, You're A distraction out my car window that goes "moo" or something
  
• I'm Anglophone, You're only intermittently intelligble to me
  
• I'm Commonwealth, You're American
  
• I'm Australasian, You're British
  
• I'm Australian, You're a New Zuhluhnduhr.
  
• I'm Victorian, You're from One Of Those Other States
  
• I'm Melburnian, You're from Regional Victoria
  
• I'm Zone 1 (just), You're Even More Suburban
  
• I'm from South of the Yarra, You're from the Urban Enclave
  
• I'm from Oakleigh, You're from Somewhere With Trams
  
• I'm Walking Distance to Oakleigh Station, You're Lost In South Oakleigh Suburbia

or else:

• I'm Grecophone, You're Less Burdened With the spectre of Our Ancient Ancestors
  
• I'm Greek, You're Cypriot
  
• I'm Cypriot, You're Greek (but that's not the side I was acculturated in)
  
• I'm Diaspora Greek, You're Metropolitan Greek (and oh, the frictions in that which only the diaspora notices)
  
• I'm Second Generation Greek, You're First Generation (in this context, Greek is *not* the in-group language: it's the parents' language)
  
• I'm an Islander, You're a Mainlander (a cultural split in Greekdom deeper than gets acknowledged)
  
• I'm from Crete, You're from an island with less machismo
  
• I'm from Easternmost Crete, You're from the rest of the island, with more machismo. (E.g.: You're the guys firing pistols at Our weddings, and goat-rustling as a bonding ritual; Our criminality is limited to eloping and distilling moonshine)
  
• I'm from Zakros, You're from some uncouth mountain village like Ziros. (Zakros is in the mountains too; but we're not uncouth, dammit)
  
• You thought Zakros was a seaside village? No, that's Lower Zakros. That's where we keep the Minoan antiquities and the tourists. I'm from Upper Zakros (where people actually live)
  
• I'm from Patela ("The Flat Bit") in Zakros, You're from the Village Square bit (where people mostly live now)

And so forth; I'll stop before drilling down to clans and families. Of course, all that was two or three sets of identity assertions, not one, and that's part of the complication. Depending on circumstance, people can lay claim to a different concentric circle. People can also lay claim to a completely different suite of concentric circles, if they have access to it; and because the world is a much more complicated place than they used to be, they now can access it. The world is a complicated enough place, that you can at times even hold mutually exclusive identities—because exclusivity is harder to achieve now. And identity is reified enough that people can object to the rigidity of a binary identity, which itself constitutes an identity. You say "I reject binary gender imposed by Society", I hear "I'm one of those genderfuck people, and You're Strayt".

But to go back to Acadia, the fact that Francophonie there is not as contiguous or clear a majority as it is in Quebec complicates Acadian identity. The French colonists mistitled the whole region after Arcadia (which is another reason I like the concept of Acadia, since my favourite language is spoken in Arcadia). The English, after their ethnic cleansing, split it up into New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia; so that already divides Acadianness up. Though since the major ethnic cleansing happened in Nova Scotia, while the forests of the New Brusnwick backcountry offered the fleeing and returning Acadians shelter, there isn't a strong Francophone element now outside New Brunswick.

But in New Brunswick itself, there is a clear difference between the North and the South. In the traditionally Acadian North, bordering with Quebec, French is the majority language, and outsiders can still be assimilated into an Acadian identity, as Acajack reports. So being Acadian is a majority identity, and has a hegemony over the local society. In the South, French is more marginalised, which is why Chiac is possible there (and why Acadieman's codeswitching is so provocative). Being Acadian is on the way to becoming something more marginal in the South: something that survives, but is no longer running the society, as local colour rather than the default colour. A few generations, and it'll be Maine, if it isn't already: lots of French-Americans, but not a lot of French in the public sphere.

Acajack's choice of terms is to call Acadian a "social" identity in the North, vs. an "ethnic" identity in the South. The differentiation makes sense: hegemony versus minority. And that is the popular way of using "ethnic", as a marked but marginal cultural presence, as opposed to the default culture. But default culture is still a culture (yes, Virginia, even Anglo-Canada is a culture). The North construct of Acadian identity may assimilate Japanese Acadians; but that does not mean that it has transcended ethnicity, and is some sort of rainbow melting-pot like the US aspires to be. So while being Acadian means very different things in the two regions, based on different power relations, one identity version isn't less grounded or more generic than the other.

The different takes on Acadian identity means that unlike Quebec, which has an articulated and uncontroversial notion of Quebecoisness (and 90% of the province), Acadianness is contested. Franco-Quebec has set out to build itself as a nation, and has marshalled all the tools of the State to do it. It has not completely tuned out Anglo-Quebec, but it hasn't really been held up in its quest by West Montreal either; and whatever the feelings of the populace about federalism, it's clearcut to them that they are now a nation in all but constitutional recognition.

That hasn't been the case with Acadia; and with French spoken by only a third of New Brunswick, it can't become the case: the pronvincial government of New Brunswick cannot be identified with an Acadian nationalism, the way the Parti Québécois could; and Ti-Louis' success in making New Brunswick officially bilingual is a very different kind of victory than Ti-Poil's success on the public use of French.

That may make Anglos think Acadian assertions of identity are somehow "nicer" than Quebecois assertions. But "nicer" goes with "unthreatening". New Brunswick bilingualism is a attempt to brake assimilation, but it's a more belated attempt than anything Quebec had to do; assimilation is where Moncton is heading, and a more dilute sense of Acadianness is inevitable, as less and less distinguishes Francophone Monctonians from their Anglophone neighbours (some of whom used to speak French).

From over the Quebec side, Angry French Guy notices Acadia, and its lack of an identity strong, centrally asserted and contiguous, and refers to it as a "State of Mind of a nation". Its borders and boundaries are fuzzy: Acadia is not New Brunswick, but both bigger than New Brunswick, and smaller than it. AFG was probably thinking of the lack of national trappings, when he called it a State of Mind of a Nation; but Acadia is also a State of Mind of a Nation, because Acadieman and Danny Thibodeau are not identical, and do not construct their Acadianness identically.

Danny Thibodeau is the roving reporter character in Acadieman. He's a real person, a local musician, who in real life is even more hirsute than his cartoon counterpart (4th photo down). And in the cartoon universe, his ideology is not noticeably different from his Moncton TV Acadie anchorman, Gerry Cormier (also a real person). He spoke of the Quebec Mur Separatiste in the newscast before Gerry did.

There are two things noticeable though about how Danny speaks in the show. First, while Gerry is just as Chiac as Acadieman, Danny does not drop any English into his dispatches that I noticed. That's not unrelated to the fact that Danny is not from Moncton: he's from North New Brunswick, where French reigns still.

The second is that Danny sounds like a caricature French lumberjack with the volume turned up to eleven. As the comments to the Acadieman website point out, he doesn't *actually* sound like that in real life:

AcadieMM: De plus, si tu savais vraiment de quoi tu parlais, tu saurais que l'Acadien moyen de Moncton ne parle pas comme Acadieman, mais que le personnage ne fait qu'utiliser un maximum d'expressions chiaques dans chaque phrase. Comme les Brayons ne parlent pas comme Danny Thibodeau, qui lui-même ne parle pas vraiment comme dans l'émission (je le sais parce qu'il m'a enseigné en 8e année).

Moreover, if you really knew what you were talking about, you'd know that the average Acadian of Moncton does not talk like Acadieman, but that the character is just using the maximum number of Chiac expressions in every sentence. Just like Brayons don't talk like Danny Thibodeau, who himself doesn't really talk like he does on the show (I know because he taught me in 8th grade).

He's still teaching, btw: I guess New Brunswick's a small place.

But Danny does have a distinctive accent, because he's not just North New Brunswick: like AcadieMM points out, he's Brayon. Brayon is yet another Russian doll to add to the constructions of identity in Acadia. The Brayons actually had an independent republic going for a few months, Wikipedia tells me, set up by an American adventurer; but the territory was remote enough, and in an ill-defined border region between provinces, for them to get away with it.

I don't know anything about the distinctive Brayon culture, and to what extent they sound in real life like caricature French lumberjack with the volume turned up to eleven. But a lumberjack from somewhere where everybody speaks French with the volume turned up to eleven (including the Japanese immigrants) is going to have a different understanding of what it means to be Acadian, than a mumbling slacker in a Moncton Home Hardware, who mixes "anyhoo" in with his French, and advises his angry customer driving while yelling on the phone that "c'est right dangereux, ça". [End of the embedded vid, but the whole thing is worth your time.]

The temptation is to say that the Chiac identity is somehow less authentic than the Brayon. But of course both are real Acadians, in different ways, and there's a reason the show's creator picked the latter to wear the Acadian flag T-shirt.

34% Francophone Moncton in Chiac country, and 98% Francophone Edmundston in Brayon country, are not at war. They share Acadianness, and they both assert it to whoever will listen. But a New Brunswick civil war was a premiss in Season 2 of Acadieman; and Dano Leblanc didn't come up with that idea out of nowhere: it reflects a real tension. It's an interesting tension: it plays out some of the old concerns on how to build nationhood, and what criteria you get to set to join in the nation. And it's played out, as an active debate complete with animation, in a microcosm.

There's an even greater tension though than North/South in New Brunswick—although it's the logical conclusion of that tension, and North and South take sides in it. That tension is on whether Anglophone Acadians get to claim that identity. That gets murkier and messier yet, and it goes to a separate post. In fact, it's already spawned a side-post that has taken a life of its own...

Those Who Have Bowed Down

This started out as a meditation on Acajack's take on assimilated Acadians. I will still do that meditation, because it's a rich vein to tap, but it's not where this post has ended up, because I'd also been discussing with a friend about community politics among Australian Aborigines, and there was some cross-fertilisation of concepts.

There is contentious debate, wherever in the world there are assimilating minorities, about who is allowed to call themselves one of the minority group. Those debates are particularly destructive with First Peoples, as in Australia and North America; but they play out wherever there's a contrast possible between degrees of assimilation. I have a Greek-American friend who migrated to Australia, and was crestfallen to find that "Greek" in Australia means something very different to "Greek" in America, and any claim to Greekness she had would be laughed off. (I would have laughed too, and that *does* tie in to Acajack's post, because it is all about degrees of assimilation. But this post is sidetracked enough already.)

The debates are destructive in small disempowered communities: they introduce dissension and hostility in a group that can least afford it, and that can gain most from a united front. Those debates are politically suicidal, but where identity actually comes from, they're rational: asserting your identity forcefully is the natural response when your distinct identity is under threat, and the target of your forcefulness will not primarily be the encroaching majority (who aren't listening anyway), but your fellows who have made a different accommodation than you have. They need to be combatted, because if everyone emulates them, your distinct identity is gone.

Hence the French-Canadian term vendus "those who have sold out", about Anglicised Canadiens, or the Greek term προσκυνημένοι "those who have bowed down [worshipped]", about Greek converts to Islam. The traitor is more of a threat than the enemy.

That's one discourse, and in some ways it's a quite rational discourse. And artificially grouping together sundered tribes, that have little in common any more, blows potholes in the common ground they are supposed to rally around. Their group identity becomes a transparent fiction. *All* group identity is a kind of fiction of course, but some fictions are too flimsy to rally around. Especially when they're divorced from the rallying points people do gravitate to.

It's politically and demographically expedient to have a Standard Gaelic, for instance. But out on the Hebrides, where their dialect is nothing like it, promoting a foreign and artificial-sounding Standard Gaelic is going to make people stop speaking any Gaelic even faster. (Yes, yes, I've read THAT book on language death.) That's a counterproductive attitude; but it means that if you're going to defend an identity, politics dictate that you do nation-building—and get people to believe that Standard Gaelic is their language after all.

But the discourse of asserting purity and dismissing perceived traitors is completely inaccessible to a majority group, because their identity is not under threat—so they can't grok the responses of those who feel it is. Well, I shouldn't say that: sometimes they can—because identities are multiple enough that you can belong to both a majority and a minority group. Anglo-Canadians still feel threatened by the US, for instance, so they should be able to do some analogy between themselves and Quebec. But any analogies between US::Canada and Canada::Quebec are going to be halting, and people aren't good at shifting perspective at the best of times.

The other problem with a purist identity discourse is, it's no way to run a country. A political entity of any size has to rein in the will of its constituents to go their own way, and stay true to their own separate identities. Which is why nation-building explicitly sets out to counter it with its own discourse. It proclaims that you are not Virginians or Rhode Islanders, but Americans; not Arvanites or Graikoi, but Hellenes. And prioritising a national identity over regional identities is a move to do away with regional identities and their purisms, and substitute them with some sort of melting pot—whether those regional identities are just geographical, or cultural, or ethnic.

Often enough, of course, that nation building does not end up suppressing the majority regional culture in the stock of the melting pot, but reasserts it. I used obscure terms to differentiate between ethnic Greeks and Greek nationals just then, and there's a reason they're obscure: the discourse of Greek nationalism has been ethnic, and tied to the lineage of the Glorious Ancestors. The Albanian and Aromanian speaking Greek nationalists accepted that discourse as much as the ethnic Greeks did, if not more.

Which is why I only know of one person—an ethnic Aromanian and decidedly pro-Greek intellectual—who did use that distinction to argue that Aromanians could be just as Hellene as Graikoi could. In mainstream Greek discourse, Graikoi aren't the majority of Hellenes: there are just Hellenes. That discourse has succeeded, and there are justifications for it; but it doesn't allow you a language of civic nationalism, it doesn't highlight that national identity is a construct and not a gene sequence.

So there are constraints and expediencies, and there is submerging and repression, and there are melting pots and arguments. And where am I going with all this?

As a matter of naive and majoritarian faith, I still think that all other things being equal, it is better to wed than to divorce, to join together rather than to stand apart, to build rather than dismantle. As a matter of reaction, I also think that it is better to respect difference than to whitewash it, to integrate than to assimilate (though some degree of assimilation will and must happen), to build a nation on norms and quirks rather than bloodlines and cults.

There are problems aplenty with that faith. For starters, the marriages are not the outcome of teenage infatuation (not that that guarantees much of anything); they're typically arranged marriages. So you don't fall into them "naturally", and one arrangement is not inherently more defensible than another. There is a selection of groups you may align with; but that choice is never voluntary at a mass level. It is driven by habit and precedent and convenience, and it is open to persuasion and counterpersuasion. So "Today, I and my neighbour choose to be Panamanian" is nonsense. But "Today we as party leaders choose to be Panamanian, and will convince our neighbours that's a good idea" is commonplace.

(Cf. "Today, we as the local landlords choose to be Bulgarian or Greek, and will convince our serfs that's a good idea." I *think* Karakasidou's is the book that was claimed in.)

All other things being equal, it is better to wed than to divorce; but all other things never are equal. If the marriage is abusive, you do not perpetuate it. All identity of a group larger than one person are marriages, and soft-focus the differences, and if any marriage is to work, some suspension of disbelief is needed. But soft-focussing the differences without whitewashing them (and embarking on an abusive relationship) is hard, and it needs leadership and compassion and its own mythology. I don't know how you promote a Standard Gaelic or Irish, which are artificial creations (as any standardised language is), without killing off East Sutherland Gaelic or Munster Irish, which are real inherited languages—and get in the way of the standardised language.

In the same way, I don't know how you promote a Canada which encompasses both French and English identity, and not end up with a Canadianness as vacuous as "citizen of the Universe"—as Angry French Guy got an anglo musician to say. (I'll note that the musician was only slightly more enthusiastic about being Quebecois: his identity assertion was primarily as a Montrealer.) I sympathise with the effort, I think it a noble thing to try; but it is somewhat deracinated, and that makes it harder to arouse passion around.

How does this uxorious metaphor apply where people are thrown together? It is better, at least politically, for traditional people X to build coalitions and to be liberal about who they accept as their in-group, than to expend energy splitting and recriminating. For utilitarian reasons if nothing else. I recognise it's very easy for me to say that, when identity is about pride and fear and struggle; and it's not like I was enthused at the prospect of calling someone Greek who didn't speak a word of it. But expediency has its place.

It is better to have an Australia than a New South Wales and a Victoria warring over protectionism. It would be nice to have an Australian federation including New Zealand, which was a prospect a century ago; but the nation-building has gone ahead now, and putting that back together is pointless. There are, after all, limits in how wide a group marriage you can have, and couples do drift apart.

I think it is better to have a Trudeauist Canada than an Anglo-Canada and a Quebec. In some vague, idealistic, shared-history, "we're all in it together" kind of way. Or failing that, as a respectful marriage of convenience (see Risque, Beau.)

But enough nation-building has happened in Quebec already that it is not compelled to invest in Canadian identity; and Anglo-Canada isn't willing to get that its identity has to be diluted to accommodate Quebec. It's like East Sutherland Gaelic vs. an artificial Standard Gaelic, in a sense: why should I give up my real, rooted identity as an Anglo-Canadian, to become a vague Trudeauist citizen of the world? I think the vague Trudeauist thing is noble, I think it, in its multicultural manifestation, the ideal still for my own country. (The one I'm typing in, not the one I did my dissertation about.)

In fact, when I was talking to my friend about the usefulness of national myths of damper, she justly refuted me—the pioneer mythology was a narrative of dispossession; and she advocated the song I Am Australian ("We are one, yet we are many") as the proper rallying point for a multicultural Australia.

But that kind of vision is a hard sell, and it takes real work to build, and it must remain vigilant against the tyranny of the majority as much as the splintering of the minority.

And that's as coherent as I can get about why I don't think Quebec should secede. It's not very coherent or compelling, and it's incoherent after a couple of months of trying to listen. But like I said elsewhere, even if the secession happens, Quebec will not expel Anglophones (though many will leave town), and there will not be a purge of Franco federalist collaboratist traitors (nope, not a fan of Jean Naimard). Difference will still have to be engaged with and can't be effaced, because purist discourses are no way to run a country, whether that country is the Dominion of Canada or the Republic of Quebec.

At least, no way to run a North American country. Or mine.

(The one I'm typing in, not the one where I got a taste for lakhanodolmadhes from. Identity is a complicated thing.)

Spokesblogger for a Nation

Montreal airport has the same Canadiana as Toronto airport. Airports sell humorous quirky takes on the local culture to inform the curious tourist—The Undutchables was all over Amsterdam airport. Toronto surtitled its Canadiana "Like Maple Syrup for the soul". Montreal surtitled it "Comme sirop d'érable pour l'âme". But it was the same English-language Canadiana in both places, with Anglo writers celebrating an experienced, real culture—Anglo-Canada; and making some marginal befuddled comments about the other Canada. They weren't about some abstract Francanglo-Canada, and weren't giving equal time to both.

Selling just Anglo-Canadiana in Trudeau airport is short changing Quebec within Quebec (though on federal land, to be sure). But it's not Douglas Copeland's and Will Ferguson's fault they didn't talk about Franco-Canada: they wisecracked about the culture they lived in, and they lived in one culture. The onus on the airport, if they really wanted to merit translating "Like Maple Syrup for the soul" into French, was to seek out Franco-Quebecois and Acadians to do the same for their culture. In English, because that's what international airports trade in.

Something like Chiac pour les Dummies, for instance. If only it actually existed. From the guy who brought you Acadieman:

Angry French Guy has mused that he wanted an English-language medium for Quebec to propound its story to the world, because English is what you propound in to the world now; and the Montreal Gazette wasn't it, because it was the medium of the Anglo-Quebecois minority, not of the (majority-French) whole province. The commenter's vision in that thread of a committee of 20, with an Inuit and 16 Francos, sounded plenty unworkable to me. But in the new media dispensation, that English-language medium propounding Quebec to the world gets to be Angry French Guy, and Chronicles of a Pure Laine, and Sovereignty en anglais. And the world—or those of the world that care enough—compare notes with Fagstein, and No Dogs Or Anglophones, and the other minority voices. A statist solution won't get more readers in than Angry French Guy's own use of anecdote and cartoons.

(Fagstein is miles apart from No Dogs, of course (and I no longer follow the latter), and Fagstein is not even tangentially about the National Question. But one of the few times he waded into that issue, on the occasion of the proposal of a .qc internet suffix, he got a cup of Angry French Guy's ire. I'm with Fagstein on internet suffixes btw; but then, I never said I was NOT an evil angryphone... I'm assuming it's all good between them now, at any rate: AFG confers on Fagstein his highest blogroll accolade: "Some Anglos who don't (always) suck".)

In the new dispensation, people looking for explication of some exotic locale don't just look to the academic or the foreign correspondent exegete. They'll google and go to a blog as well. But to do the exegesis of exotic locale X, the blogger has to be fluent enough in English—not just linguistically but culturally—to be engaging; and patient enough to explain things the locale-Xian tires of justifying.

That doesn't just apply to Franco-Quebec, but to any number of cultures you may not be familiar with. Including native speakers of English of course. It's part of why Ta-Nehisi Coates is on my blogroll. That, and he's an amazing writer who does brave explorations of empathy and working the world out as he goes. All the more rewarding when he hits the limits of where empathy can reach, and explains how.

In the new dispensation then, if you as a clueless Anglo want to understand Quebec, you don't just go to Ramsay Cook (which I did) or Jane Warren (which I haven't yet, *very* embarrassingly: I'll explain why later). You (also, or first, or only) go to Angry French Guy. Whether he intended it or not, he's a spokesperson for Quebec. From what I gather, he did explicitly intend to get the Franco-Quebecois perspective out there in English, to counter a deluge of Anglo-Canadian attacks in English. But that makes him a spokesperson for Quebec anyway.

Just like happened with the Iceland Weather Report. When a friend of mine went to Iceland for her postdoc a couple of years ago, I googled around to see what she was getting herself into, and happened across this blog. Informative and quirky, written by an Icelander who was, like AFG, linguistically and culturally fluent in English, and a very engaging writer. She did not volunteer to be Spokeswoman for Iceland, and I shouldn't be sidestepping the Icelandic blogosphere to single her out as the Spokeswoman—any more than Ta-Nehisi should be the only African-American writer I ever read, or I should assume AFG is the only Franco-Quebecois voice of Quebec, and ignore the riches of the French Quebecois blogosphere (which I did briefly tap into at the start).

But I don't read Icelandic and am not going to. So it was easier for me to treat Iceland Weather Report as my go-to source for all things Icelandic. Lazy, but explicable.

Iceland Weather Report was quirky and fluffy and intriguing in the start of 2008 when I popped over, to find out what on earth was the deal with the New Year's fireworks, and how does French cuisine work out when you have to ship in all your ingredients. Our intrepid correspondent was even taking to calling her country Niceland and sounding only mildly ironic. And the blog still is quirky and fluffy and intriguing.

But later in 2008, when I'd tuned out of Iceland, a small financial disruption hit the country; and though our correspondent was not an economist, or a pundit, or an Icelandic political blogger, this financial disruption affected her too, as an Icelandic citizen, and she posted about what things looked like from where she stood.

This got her lots of English commenters with pitchforks, since the UK government had decided Iceland was the New Al Qaeda. Because those English commenters, like me, googled the first English-language blog on Iceland they could find, to work out how this country had evaporated their life's savings, and they were going to let her know it. This also got her some editorial spots in the Guardian—because Guardian journos, just like Englishmen with pitchforks, googled the first English-language blog on Iceland they could find. (That shouldn't come across as a diss: she is an excellent writer, and she deserved the editorial spots.) And finally, it got her sullen phone calls from the Icelandic Central Bank, peeved that she was bringing their country into disrepute internationally with her humble blog.

A lot of unasked-for power and notoriety, for someone who just happened to be explaining the Ways of Nicelanders to Anglophones. To deem her a spokesblogger is a superficial approach to a diversity of opinion and experience, and an absurd expectation to place on any individual; Ta-Nehisi Coastes angrily dismisses that kind of talk, and I don't blame him. But that's the new media dispensation, and that's what Englishmen with pitchforks are googling for.

For all I know, there may be bloggers in Icelandic just as peeved as the Central Bank, that Iceland Weather Report is getting all this attention and they're not. That doesn't mean she should stop doing what she's doing; on the contrary, the new dispensation means you need more people like her to get your message out. And unlike the 20-person panel mooted at Angry French Guy, you can't control what they say; you just hope they're on your side. And that they're fairly representing to the Anglophone world the range of what the Icelandophone blogosphere was saying (as the Weather Report does).

It occurred to me that this Spokesblogger For A Nation thing was taking hold when, just after I revisited the Iceland Weather Report, a commenter on Angry French Guy linked to a short video on one of the balancing acts in the use of public language in Quebec. The video featured as its talking heads an academic, a government official (I am still bowled over by the Quebecois accent), a couple of Anglo activists—and Mr Angry French Guy himself. Who was not wearing a luchador mask (if that's what the avatar is).


AFG didn't ask to be a talking head when he decided he was sick of the Anglo editorialising on the radio, and was going to start writing online. But he's a good writer and a thoughtful critic, and has a substantial following. He deserves to be a talking head as much as the other people on the doco. Not inerrant, not without his blindspots—but then, I don't expect godhood of my talking heads, I expect thought and challenge, and he delivers.

The doco was a bit He-Said She-Said, I gotta say, although it did successfully point out the delicate balance which satisfied noone, of creating "French Spoken Here" signs but not mass-distributing them. But at least I found out from the doco what on earth AFG meant by NDG being where he lives.

(And—unsolicited advice here, I know—NDG means living in a fairly Anglo neighbourhood apparently (Deepest Darkest West Montreal), but AFG doesn't need to bring that up as a defence. If what he's saying is fair to the Anglophone minority in Quebec, it should stand on its own merits as an argument, even if none of his best friends are Anglo. :-)

Franco-Canada Blogged

There will be a blog post ruminating on Acadieman, Brayons, and "weekend Acadians". After I got taken to the woodshed at the pub Friday by a friend who's spent a lot of time in Quebec, there will also be some flailing about on civic nationalism, and whether defence of a language is enough to rally a national identity around. (It looks it at the moment, which is why I got taken to the woodshed for suggesting it isn't. So I still have to either think it through, or post whatever rubbish comes into my head anyway.)

And until I write those posts, two links to other people blogging:

Angry French Guy has his own post on what he (as a Quebecois) makes on Acadia. My tendentious and ill-informed summary:

• Yup, Quebec to Acadia is like Australia to NZ (or Canada to Quebec)—with the larger party not particularly aware of the smaller, and the smaller party defining itself in opposition.
  
• Acadia does still assimilate immigrants to Acadianicity. The "Weekend Acadians" post, prompted by a comment by Acajack in response to me, will include stuff about the difference between Northern New Brunswick, where Acadianicity is still a dominant, assimilating identity, and Southern New Brunswick, where it yields to English. (It won't include a *lot*, but it sets up an interesting conundrum on types of identity that I have to deal with as a Greek-Australian msyelf.)
  
• Franco-Canadians from outside Quebec go to Moncton U because they repudiate the Quebec-as-French-Homeland argument, and are passionately invested in Canada. As I'd been surmising from other posts.
  
• They've ended up getting jobs in Quebec anyway, because you can't get a job in French in the Yukon. So they *have* done aliyah.

I didn't *like* the conclusion to Acajack's comment on "weekend Acadians" (though I sort of identified with it), which is why I'll post about it. AFG's conclusion... I'm not happy that you can't get a job in French outside Quebec (and Officially-Bilingual New Brunswick, hence AFG's Avoiding Speeding Ticket strategy). But those are the facts of French waning outside the Homeland-And-A-Half. I'd prefer Aliyah not to be necessary in my ideal world; but there are good reasons why Aliyah is necessary in this world.

The other post, chez Big Media Matt, triggered by a conservative blogger's post pro-Quebec Separatism (because it gives him a useful cudgel in the American culture wars: we all have our own reasons for taking an interest in another's politics). Matt's post, with comments (some informative), is on the virtues and vices of being a Deracinated Cosmopolitan Elite. Which *is* the ideal I'm inchoately defending, though I do also see the downsides in deracination.

Further on Acadia: Duelling "I am Canadian"s

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.

Acadieman

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.

The Civic Nationalism of Quebec

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"]

Montreal VI: Joual 4, Nicholas 1

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*