Читать книгу Language planning and policy in Quebec - Jakob Leimgruber - Страница 15

Before European contact, and to a large extent still today, the Canadian part of the North American continent was peopled by a diverse range of ethnic and linguistic groups. Some of the language families found in this vast area are (from east to west) Algonquian, Iroquoian, Eskimo-Aleut, Siouan, Na-Dené, Salishan, and Wakashan (see Lewis et al. 2016 for an overview of the languages on the North American continent). The northern half of the country has always been sparsely populated, with speakers of Eskimo-Aleut settling primarily in coastal communities. The western seaboard of British Columbia, blessed with a more temperate climate, exhibits higher linguistic diversity; ample food supply, in the form of ‘a never-ending supply of fish’, primarily salmon (Bothwell, 2007, 7), enabled the emergence of wealthy cultures with distinct internal social stratification.

Pre-Columbian European contact took place when Norse expeditions to the eastern Canadian shore began under the leadership of Leif Eriksson. These travels, via Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin Island (the presumed location of the Norse Helluland), resulted in the founding, around the year 1000, of a settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, on the island of Newfoundland (now a listed National Historic Site of Canada in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador). This settlement, which Ingstad and Stine Ingstad (2000) consider to be the historical Vínland of old Icelandic sagas, did not last long: contact with the local indigenous population, called Skrælings by the Norse and presumed to be Dorset Eskimos (the only Inuits to have lived south of the treeline, see Bothwell, 2007, 9), was rough enough to persuade the Vikings to leave for good again after some years. The Norse may have gone back to harvest timber from a place called ‘Markland’ in the sagas, with Icelandic records mentioning, as late as 1347, a ship returning from this place that has been speculated to have been located on the Labrador coast (Seaver, 1996).

Figure 2.1: A map of Canada showing Quebec.

The received wisdom is that Canada was left untouched by Europeans for two centuries thereafter, until Columbus’ 1492 crossing of the Atlantic. There is some evidence, however, that Portuguese and Basque fishing expeditions kept the transatlantic route open, with some Basque records ‘point[ing] towards their having made contact with Newfoundland in the 1370s’ (Forbes, 1993, 20). In any case, Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean and, later, to South and Central America, did not impact the much more northerly regions that would later become Canada.

It was later, in 1497 and 1498 that John Cabot, sailing under British commission, began exploring the region around Newfoundland, but without making further inroads into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The Portuguese also laid claim to an area around Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the early sixteenth century, with the explorer João Fernandes Lavrador giving his name to Labrador (Rorabaugh et al., 2004). The few Portuguese settlements established there, however, did not last long. It was the French colonial expansion, beginning with Jacques Cartier’s landing in 1534, that was to have a lasting impact on the continent. From the first cross planted on the Gaspé peninsula to the later settlements along the Saint Lawrence River, Cartier’s ships sailed up the river all the way to the rapids around present-day Montreal and its ‘Mont Royal’.

French explorers and adventurers created alliances with aboriginal peoples, using their local expertise in geography, and establishing trading links (especially for fur) along a complex network that would be crucial for the eventual colonisation of the entire land. Unlike the Spanish expeditions to South America, contact was not entirely hostile and bent on the stealing of natural resources (the area had little gold, and fur did not have the same appeal in Europe; rich fishing grounds were the main attraction), with Cartier’s landing party even being helped over the winter of 1535–1536 by the Iroquois of Hochelaga (Montreal), whom Bothwell (2007, 18) considers ‘hosts’ reasonably well-disposed towards their ‘guests’. Later, more permanent settlements were established by Samuel de Champlain in Port-Royal in 1605 (in the colony of Acadia, now Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia) and the city of Québec in 1608. Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve founded Montreal in 1642. These areas, collectively claimed for the French crown and named New France, extended, by the early eighteenth century, from Acadia over the Great Lakes and the prairies of Saskatchewan to Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta in a giant arc, largely leaving the Atlantic seaboard to British colonial interests, where major settlement took place (Jamestown in 1607, Boston 1620).

The British presence in Canada coincides to a great extent with French presence, though their numbers were, initially, lower. British expeditions in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century brought explorers such as Frobisher, Davis, and Hudson in search of the Northwest Passage, the famed sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, long supposed to exist but only recently (since 2009) having become more navigable, expected at the time to reduce the long journey to Cathay (China, 契丹). While the Passage itself remained elusive, the expeditions did provide the British a foothold in the heart of the continent, enabling them to establish trading ports and links with the aboriginal fur trade networks. The chartering of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670 increased British activity on the shores of the Hudson Bay (see Figure 2.1), and resulted in more trading posts and settlements around river mouths as well as further upstream. Later in the eighteenth century, the settlements in the future thirteen colonies began to expand, largely driven by the settlers’ search for additional resources. Furthermore, a larger number of new arrivals meant that the British soon overtook the French, as the following passage from Boberg (2010, 57) explains:

French emigration to North America amounted to no more than 10000–15000 people over the 150-year history of New France; natural increase was the main factor in raising the colony’s population to around 70000 by 1760 (Charbonneau et al., 2000, 104, 106). By contrast, Britain’s American colonies received over 300000 immigrants over the same period, helping to raise their population to well over a million by 1760 (Gemery, 2000, 171).1

The consequence of this rise in the British presence in North America was an ‘inevitable clash of French and British colonial aims’ (Boberg, 2010, 58), resulting in a number of skirmishes eventually culminating in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). This war, rather a series of battles fought globally between the major powers at the time (foremost Britain and France, but also Prussia, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Russia, the Mughal Empire and a number of German states, but also including several aboriginal nations in Canada and the American colonies), ended with complete British control over the entirety of eastern North America. It actually began with the British assault on Acadia in 1755, followed by the expulsion of the Acadians, an event remembered as Le grand dérangement in which 11500 of the region’s 14000 Acadians were deported until the end of the war, to locations ranging from Quebec to Louisiana. French retaliation saw the capture of British forts south of the Great Lakes, but 1759 brought a series of British victories, culminating in the battle on the Plains of Abraham outside Québec, the capital city of New France, leading to its capture after a siege lasting three months. French counteroffensives in 1760 were defeated, with final surrender at Montreal in September 1760. With the exception of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon (which would change hands repeatedly for the following one hundred years), France had lost control of its erstwhile possessions in North America with the Treaty of Paris of 1763. This loss of control effectively cut off Francophones in North America from the ‘mother country’ in Europe, with repercussions in linguistic terms (varieties of French on the two sides of the Atlantic diverging through decreased contact) and in ethnic population terms (with dramatically reduced immigration from France, internal procreation became the only source of population increase).

A thorough account of English-speaking migration to Canada is given in Boberg (2010, 58ff). Apart from the English mission led by (the Venetian) John Cabot in 1497, Humphrey Gilbert was chartered in 1583 to establish an English colony on St. John’s, Newfoundland. Actual settlement was seen as less important than fishing monopolies, so that only some small settlements were allowed after 1610, and they were often subject to harassment from British fishermen as well as French colonists. Nonetheless, when the British took control in 1763, pockets of English-speaking settlers (primarily from the West Country and Ireland) had already ‘existed tenuously for 150 years’ (Boberg, 2010, 59). After the Acadian deportation, American colonists were invited to settle Nova Scotia; many came from New England, and more would come after the revolutionary war. Loyalists started moving into Canada from 1775, and after the evacuations of Boston (1776) and of Philadelphia (1778) more came, often by ship via New York City, which was evacuated in 1783. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were the destinations of choice: 35000 settlers arrived (Boberg, 2010, 62). Other Loyalists arrived over land, primarily to what is now Quebec and Ontario: around 7000–8000 were eventually moved upstream into Ontario (Boberg, 2010, 63). Care was taken not to upset the French–English linguistic balance too much in Quebec with the arrival of so many new anglophone settlers. As a result, only around 2000 Loyalists remained in the western part of Quebec, and just 300 in Montreal. Post-Loyalist emigration from America occurred in the Eastern Townships of Quebec around 1791: ‘by 1817, approximately 20000 people had settled [there], virtually all from northern New England’ (Boberg, 2010, 64).

Direct immigration from Britain had already begun before the war. Settlers came primarily from Scotland, whence 18000–21000 arrived between 1791 and 1811. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, English and Irish settlers arrived in their tens of thousands, resulting in a quadrupling of Newfoundland’s population within thirty years (Boberg, 2010, 65). The population was roughly half English and half Irish by 1857, though on St. John’s, about four times as many immigrants were Irish-born than English-born. It bears pointing out, as does Boberg (2010, 66), that many of the Irish (and, indeed, Scottish) settlers were in fact speakers of Gaelic rather than anglophone – although knowledge of English, if not full bilingualism, may have been more common. In the nineteenth century, poverty and economic disenchantment drew more Europeans to emigrate to the Americas, such as Scottish peasants suffering from the Highland Clearances or farm labourers made redundant in the wake of large-scale industrialisation. Boberg (2010, 68–69) also mentions that in the wake of the defeat of Napoleon and in view of Britain’s global Empire, it needed people to populate its dominions (Australia, New Zealand, and British North America), administer them, and defend them. Financial incentives were offered to thousands of migrants who could not afford passage.

Not all migrants from Britain went to Canada, and not all who arrived in Canada stayed there. The difficulty in assessing the statistics of migration for that period (which includes the massive waves of emigration resulting from the Irish potato famine 1845–1849) is described at length in Boberg (2010, 70–76). What is certain is that most arrivals from Britain arrived at the port of Québec, and, after the 1850s, Montreal. Even if a large proportion of these arrivals were transitory migrants, small numbers remained in the area, and Montreal, especially, soon took on a decidedly multiethnic and multicultural face. There were, obviously, the Francophones, descendants of the early New France colonists (though by 1851 they were a minority of 45 % (Levine, 1990, 8)), as were Anglophones, who had had a presence at least since the Conquest, and who, by then, could be classified into a wealthy mercantile class, typically Scottish, and a mostly Irish working class (Levine 1990, 8; Boberg 2010, 80–81). The new wave of immigration brought more Irish, Scottish, and English people, but also a large number of Germans and Dutch, and, later in the early twentieth century, Jews and Italians, the latter settling in distinct ethnic neighbourhoods of Montreal.

A glimpse into the linguistic realities of late eighteenth-century Quebec can be caught, for instance, in a collection of Montreal Gazette advertisements seeking help in retrieving fugitive slaves, published in Extian-Babiuk (2006) (see also Mackey 2010b). Consider the excerpt below, taken from an advert posted on 21 July 1791 by one J. Joseph of Berthier (present-day Berthierville, on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River, halfway between Montreal and Trois-Rivières):

RUN AWAY From the subscriber in the Night of the 13th instant: A NEGRO WENCH, named Cloe, about thirty years old, pretty stout made, but not tall; speaks English and French, the latter not fluently. […] She is supposed to have gone off in a canoe with a man of low stature and dark complexion, who speaks English, Dutch, and French. (Mackey, 2010b, 334, emphasis mine)

Many of the adverts listed in Extian-Babiuk (2006) and Mackey (2010b) mention the languages used by the slaves, many of whom used several languages (viz. ‘speaks English and French fluently’ (Extian-Babiuk, 2006, 39), ‘parle Anglois et François’ (Mackey, 2010b, 335), ‘speaks good English and some broken French and Micmac’ (Mackey, 2010b, 337), or, in the ‘for sale’ section, ‘She can adapt herself equally to an English, French or German family, she speaks all three languages’ (Kesterton, 1967, 7)). The highlighting of language proficiency serves primarily as part of the general description of the fugitive. Knowledge of English or French must have been, at least to a certain extent, a function of the ‘master’ household’s language(s). Nevertheless, the evident multilingualism present in at least some of these peripheral (i.e. powerless) members of early British North American society is an indication of the wider contact pattern between languages: slaves may have changed hands from anglophone to francophone households, suggesting proximity and commercial exchange between the two communities. Bilingualism in the slave population may also have come as an advantage to their ‘owners’, who could thus rely on the language skills of their workforce. It is also worth noting that this disenfranchised part of the population was absorbed (though not fully assimilated) into the general Canadian population after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (Drescher, 2008). Their language repertoires, therefore, are of relevance to the history of language contact in Quebec and Canada.

The various waves of immigration moving into British North America also offer an insight into the languages used by early Canadians. While immigration from France was reduced to a trickle after the Conquest, large-scale efforts to populate the rather empty Prairies were undertaken after 1867. These efforts also took the form of organised advertisement campaigns in locations of interest, with immigrants coming ‘preferably from Great Britain, the United States, and northern Europe, in that order’ (Knowles, 2007). Posters were printed for dissemination there, often in the language of the target population. Figure 2.2 shows such an advert in Swedish, promising ‘160 acres [i.e. 65 ha] of free land for every farmer’ out of the 200 million available in Western Canada.

To sum up the political situation, the Conquest of 1760 and the Treaty of Paris of 1763 handed over New France to Britain, and ‘Quebec’ was organised as a British province (also comprising present-day eastern and southern Ontario) in the same year. In 1774, the Quebec Act granted French civil law, as well as religious and linguistic rights (detailed below) to the inhabitants of Quebec. The term ‘British North America’ was used after 1783 to refer to territories under British control north of the newly independent United States of America. The Constitutional Act 1791 divided Quebec into two provinces, Upper Canada (roughly equivalent to present-day southern Ontario, extending as far north to the watershed of the Hudson Bay) and Lower Canada (now southern Quebec and Labrador), named for their respective locations on the Saint Lawrence River. Unification of the two provinces as the ‘United Province of Canada’ took place in 1841, but ‘Confederation’, a process started with an increase in local autonomy in the British North American provinces in the 1840s, eventually culminated in the British North America Act 1867. The BNA Act brought together the provinces of Canada (i.e., Ontario and Quebec), Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a single political entity, a ‘dominion’, named Canada. Rupert’s Land, owned by the Hudson Bay Company and including the entire continent west and north of the Province of Canada (excluding British Columbia), was brought into the Confederation in 1870 as the Northwest Territories and Manitoba. A year later, British Columbia joined, extending the country’s reach from one ocean to the other.2

Figure 2.2: Poster advertising emigration to Canada in Swedish (from Gagnon, 2016). The orthography used places the poster before the spelling reform of 1906.

The colony of Prince Edward Island joined in 1873. Yukon was carved out from the Northwest Territories to become its own territory in 1898, as were Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905 (as provinces rather than territories). Newfoundland and Labrador, which had remained a colony until it became a dominion in its own right in 1907, finally joined in 1949. Lastly, the territory of Nunavut was separated from the Northwest Territories in 1999, resulting in the largest area (1.8 million square kilometres) and the smallest population (31906 in 2011) of any province or territory. Subsequent to Confederation, Canada remained a dominion under British rule, with gradually increasing autonomy being transferred to Ottawa (named the capital of the Province of Canada in 1857), such as with the Statute of Westminster 1931, which gave legislative independence to dominions of the Empire. However, only after 1982 was it possible for constitutional matters to be debated and decided solely by Canada, without each amendment to the constitution having to be made by the British parliament. The Canada Act 1982, passed by the parliament of the United Kingdom, sealed the ‘patriation’ of the constitution, i.e. its full transfer under Canadian responsibility. For all intents and purposes, full sovereignty had been achieved: even though the sovereign head of state, the Queen of Canada, is the same person as the sovereign head of another fifteen Commonwealth Realms, the Crown (represented in Canada by a federal Governor General and by provincial Lieutenant Governors) remains a distinct legal entity in each realm.