Linguistics

Quebecers need not envy the French

What do words like pourvoirie, dépanneur, polyvalente, motoneige and aluminerie have in common? They are Quebecisms created by francophone Quebecers to designate their realities. You can find them in Le Devoir but not in Le Monde.

In fact, Quebecers, with their vital and dynamic language, have no reason to envy the French from France. This is what doctoral student Marie-Éva de Villers’ comparative study revealed. The author of the Multidictionnaire de la langue française (Québec/Amérique) scanned 25,000 articles in the daily Le Devoir and 52,405 articles the daily Le Monde published in 1997. That’s a total of 13 million words for Le Devoir and 24 million for Le Monde! Take away the repetitions, and that’s 25,000 words from each daily newspaper.

Ms de Villers focussed primarily on Quebecisms, that is, words imported from France that have since disappeared there (achalandage, avant-midi, écornifler), words borrowed from other languages (atoca, achigan), and words created here to designate realities specific to Quebec, new realities or to avoid words borrowed from English (acériculture, courriel, téléavertisseur). The last category was the largest, representing 68% of all Quebecisms culled exclusively from Le Devoir.

“Innovation is the major differentiating factor in terms of the vocabulary used in the dailies from Quebec and France, and it’s also the driving force behind linguistic creativity that draws deeply from French sources,” writes Ms de Villers. Clearly, there is a “steadfast will, since the British conquest, not to capitulate to the sweeping Anglo-saxon wave.”

There is nonetheless considerable overlapping between French and Québécois: 77% of words, and more if we include suffixed forms such as bouchardiste, eurocrate, haussmanien. Even Ms de Villers was surprised. “I would have thought that Le Monde would contain a much richer vocabulary, but in fact it does not.” However, Ms de Villers was not surprised by the linguistic vitality of Québécois since “the backward-looking and pessimistic discourse on language is contrary to everything I perceived intuitively.”

Ms de Villers’ thesis will be published by Québec/Amérique this fall, in the form of an essay, entitled Le vif désir de durer (an incredible will to survive), a faithful illustration of Quebec French. The title is evocative of a collection of poems by Paul Éluard dedicated to his wife: Le dur désir de durer. The publication, in bookstores September 28, is written in a style that the author hopes will be accessible to all those interested in linguistic matters, not just language specialists.

Monique Cormier, Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Translation in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, directed the doctoral thesis and applauds the “outstanding finesse and precision” of the research conducted by Ms de Villers. The research showed that “the standard of the Quebec lexicography does not reflect the real standard that emerges from the analysis of the written sources,” says Prof. Cormier.

For the renowned lexicographer, this project is the fruit of a passion for language, a passion she owes to her father who passed on his love of dictionaries. “My father planted the seed. When I was six or seven years old, he gave me an illustrated Larousse dictionary. For a long time, I kept it on my night table, and I began to love dictionaries. Gifts from my father were often dictionaries,” Ms de Villers reflects.