Right proud to be Dead Ducks?

Sophie Durocher

Monday, 17 July, 2017 05:00

UPDATE
Monday, 17 July, 2017 05:00

Look at this article

Last week, I told you that I found it absurd that the slogan of the Games of the canadian francophonie to be bilingual. In choosing the slogan, ” Right proud of it ! “the organisers of the games in Moncton-Dieppe showed how the French spoken in certain parts of Canada has become a franglais bastard, neither fish nor. It is still amazing that at an event that pays tribute to the language of Molière uses a slogan that pays tribute to the language of Shakespeare !

I have received many emails after the publication of this column and I would like to answer.

Pride in a language

Some write to me to say that in Quebec we use full of anglicisms and that one is not better than the Acadians who use expressions bilingual as ” right proud “.

Yes, in Québec, we say ” checker “, ” canceler “, a ” schedule “… but we don’t make that the official slogan of a national event !

Young people say “full” at any end of the field. But I would be the first to denounce the fact that a national event has the slogan ” Full proud to be Québécois “.

The Games of the canadian francophonie does not celebrate bilingualism. They celebrate the fact that young francophones living in French in the four corners of the country.

Give a slogan, bilingual for an event to be francophone, it is as if a congress of vegetarians had as slogan : “long Live the tofu and beef. “The two are mutually exclusive.

The more damage, in this story, it is that the French language is rich, packed full of poetry, of images, of evocation. It is not as if we had been short of words to speak of pride…

A Acadien wrote me to defend the French spoken in her corner of the country. “You have no perspective on the challenges faced by francophone organizations outside of Quebec “, me-t-he writes. “Quebec has an approach that is too aggressive when it comes to protecting its language. “

To read your text full of inflections in English, I do not find, Sir, that Quebec is too aggressive. Quite to the contrary.

In my column, I asked you if you were surprised by this choice of slogan. A reader told me : “I had no surprise. I thought, however, that the appropriate title for this festival should rather be : The Festival of the Dead Ducks. Then, I told myself that it had maybe already been used. “

Of course, this drive was a reference to René Lévesque, who has already declared that francophones outside Quebec were dead ducks, culturally speaking.

Let’s say that when you see that some francophones are proud to speak a mixture of French and English, it was a thought for René.

The sport has no language

But beyond all that, is it possible to ask the question of the relevance of the Games of the canadian francophonie ? As young people play frisbee, volleyball, or basketball in French or serbo-Croatian, it changes what ?

In addition, according to Radio-Canada, during the Games, which ended Saturday, a very large number of young people spoke between them… in English.