Читать книгу Language planning and policy in Quebec - Jakob Leimgruber - Страница 11

There is no shortage of research into the variety of French known as (français) québécois. Many focus on the lexicon (Dulong, 1989; Poirier, 1998), the grammar (Léard, 1995), and the phonology (Walker, 1984; Dumas, 1987; Ostiguy and Tousignant, 2008), others take a more historical linguistic approach (Charbonneau and Guillemette, 1994; Gendron, 2007). The French presence in North America can be traced back to the mid-sixteenth century, with more permanent settlements stabilising in the early seventeenth century (see section 2.1 for a detailed historical background). The language brought across the Atlantic by these settlers was the vernacular spoken by former residents of a rather restricted set of provinces in metropolitan France. The vast majority hailed from west of Paris and north of Bordeaux; the provinces of the South, i.e. those of the langue d’oc, played a negligible part in the settlement history. Charbonneau and Guillemette (1994) provide a breakdown of the numbers from their study, given in Table 1.1, which shows that over a third of settlers came from Normandie and Île-de-France combined, another fifth comes from the Aunis-Poitou area (around La Rochelle and Poitiers); on the other hand, langue d’oc provinces account for just 4.8 %. An overview of the provinces of origin is given in Figure 1.1

Table 1.1: Province of origin of early French settlers (Charbonneau and Guillemette, 1994, 169).

The data behind these numbers come from marriage records, which are the prime source of such information in the Quebec context. Charbonneau and Guillemette (1994) go to great lengths to explain the care that should be taken when analysing such historical data. For one, manuscript records are hard to read. Secondly, the declaration of origin, normally made by the settlers themselves, may not be entirely accurate, and sometimes differs in terms of precision: sometimes the city is mentioned, sometimes only the province, a bishopric, a parish, or just a geographical term such as an island. Actually pinpointing these toponyms to a precise cartographic location is also not as straightforward as it may seem. Provinces under the Ancien Régime did not necessarily have clearly-defined boundaries, at least not from an administrative point of view (Charbonneau and Guillemette, 1994, 163).

Two competing views on the emergence of the rather uniform Colloquial Quebec French (CQF) exist, depending on whether dialect levelling (le choc des patois) happened in France or in New France. The latter of these views is taken by Barbaud (1984), Barbaud (1996), who argues that immigrants spoke, before their arrival in New France, their provincial patois in France. Except for those from the Île-de-France region, therefore, the majority of settlers were non-francophone. The prime linguistic integrating factor is considered to include the 900 filles du roy, young women educated (typically in Paris itself) in the French language of the court, specially selected for the task of relocating to New France between 1665 and 1673 to help the primarily male settlers populate the colony. Barbaud hypothesises that they eventually became the mothers of an entire generation, whose linguistic unification they shaped through their common language background, rather than through any other top-down language policy.

Figure 1.1: Historic French provinces (Charbonneau and Guillemette, 1994, 164).

By contrast, Wittmann (1995), Wittmann (1998) argues for a koinéisation in France, prior to emigration. His comparative structural analysis of several colonial and metropolitan varieties of French reveals a three-fold classification of varieties of seventeenth-century French: a first group comprises ‘northern’ French varieties, including rural Parisian and the language of the court. A second type is the urban koiné that emerged in Paris and that would form the basis for subsequent linguistic integration in other metropolitan French cities. A final group comprises creole varieties. Wittman’s contention is that would-be colonisers would usually spend a considerable amount of time in urban settings prior to emigration, thereby acquiring the koiné that would act as a supra-regional levelled variety. If all or the majority of settlers indeed came from such urban agglomerations, the linguistic distance between settler groups would have been much reduced before the crossing of the Atlantic. Therefore, colloquial speech in New France would have been much more homogeneous than that of metropolitan France, where much diversity (to the point of mutual unintelligibility) prevailed until well after the Revolution.

The evolution of spoken CQF since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took a path different from the one the French language took in Europe, partly because of the geographical distance and partly because of the political isolation after the British conquest of 1760. Present-day CQF is markedly different from European French. It differs, obviously, at the lexical level, with many English loans (wiper, fun, cute, checker ‘to verify’, au meilleur de ma connaissance ‘to the best of my knowledge’), archaisms (barrer (une porte) ‘to lock (a door)’, souliers ‘generic footwear’, noirceur ‘darkness’, maganer ‘to damage’), and a distinct repertoire of swearwords – unknown elsewhere – directly derived from Catholic liturgical items (crisse ‘Christ’, câlisse ‘chalice’, tabarnak (from tabernacle ‘church tabernacle’)). The phonology shows a consonant system that is identical to that of European French, but with the additional rule that the dental plosives /t/ and /d/, when before the high front vowels and semi-vowels /i/, /y/, /j/, and /ɥ/, affricate to become /t͜s/ and /d͜z/ respectively; in addition, certain final consonant clusters may be reduced. Vowel phonemes are more numerous in CQF, with the maintenance of distinctions between pairs of vowels that have been lost in Europe: this includes the pairs /a/ and /ɑː/ (patte vs pâte), /ɛ/ and /ɛː/ (mettre vs maître), /ø/ and /ə/ (jeu vs je), and /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/ (brin vs brun). In the basilect, /œ̃/is rhotacised to [œ̃˞] , and /ɛː/, /o/, and /ø/ may nasalise before nasal consonants. /ɑ̃/ may be pronounced as [æ̃] in open syllables and as [ãʊ̯̃] in checked syllables. In final open syllables, /a/ is, in basilectal speech, rounded to [ɔ]. In words with the spelling ⟨oi⟩, remnants of the older pronunciation may occur in realisations such as [wɔ], [wɛ], or even [ɛ].

At the grammatical level, gender assignment may differ from European French in the case of English loans (cf. QF la job vs EF le job). There is a particle tu whose addition to a statement transforms it into a polar interrogative (C’est lourd. ‘It is heavy.' → C’est-tu lourd? ‘Is it heavy?'). The future simple is typically absent, with the construction ALLER+INF being used instead. Relative clauses may be marked by an invariable relative pronoun que or instead by the use of an interrogative pronoun. At the pragmatic level, tu-usage (instead of the formal vous) is generally more widespread in Quebec than in Europe (Lambert, 1967; Deshaies, 1991; Peeters and Ramière, 2009). Among the reasons offered for this difference are the influence of English (which does not have a T/V distinction) and the purportedly more egalitarian and less socially stratified nature of Quebec society.

In addition to the colloquial form of French, it can be argued that there is, presently, a Standard Quebec French (SQF) that is virtually identical to the standard varieties of French in other francophone countries; this is the variety that is taught in schools and generally used in formal settings. At the grammatical level, SQF is indistinguishable from Standard French French or Standard Swiss French, for instance. Obviously, there are lexical differences, many of them the result of corpus planning efforts stemming from a lower tolerance threshold for English-derived loanwords. Thus, among the words proposed by the Office québécois de la langue française are many from the field of computing and online activities: courriel ‘e-mail’, pourriel ‘spam e-mail’, hameçonnage ‘phishing’, baladodiffusion ‘podcasting’, espiogiciel ‘spyware’, or clavardage ‘chat’. While some, like courriel, have had an impact beyond Quebec, crossing the Atlantic into European French, others are barely used even in Quebec (such as pollupostage ‘spamming’). The most distinguishing features, of course, occur at the phonetic level, with a distinctive accent that sets SQF apart from, say, Standard French French. Among them are the preservation of the distinctions between /a/ and /ɑ/ (patte vs pâte), /ɛ/ and /ɛː/ (mettre vs maître), and /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/ (brin vs brun) also found in CQF. Rhotacisation, however, is absent in the standard. The tendency, also described above for CQF, for dental stops /t/ and /d/, when followed by the high front vowels (or semi-vowels) /i/, /y/, /j/, and /ɥ/, to affricate towards /t͜s/ and /d͜z/, may appear in near-acrolectal speech too.