It would take a Swift or a Voltaire to do justice to the battle between the “language police” and outraged Anglophones in Quebec.
At issue is a law requiring that commercial signs be written only in French in Canada’s Francophone province. So vexed was an English speaking undertaker in southern Quebec that he took his grievance to the United Nations, and lo, its Commission on Human Rights has ruled that the French only law conflicts with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Americans need to mind their tongues before ridiculing Quebec. A similar argument divides Florida’s Dade County, whose Spanish speaking majority wants to scrap an English only rule that applies to official county business. Normally rational being scan tum loopy on questions of language. Partly in response to Gordon Melntyre’s protest over calling his funeral home a “salon funeraire,” Quebec’s parliament is debating a law that would modify the French only rule.
Passion abounds. “If this law passes,” thunders Camille Laurin, an old line Quebec nationalist, “Quebecers can say goodbye to a French speaking nation.” An English speaking columnist in Montreal charges that the French only rule is arrogant and uncivilized—straight out of a tradition that defames English speakers as “scum, enemies, robbers, slave drivers, aliens, corrupters of religion, culture and language, oppressors and demons.”
Especially irksome to Anglophones are the “language police” of the Commission for the Protection of the French Language. These operatives dealt with 1,800. Complaints last year, most of them brought by four especially vigilant sign watchers, at a cost of nearly $2 million, Alas and helas, the proposed new sign law won’t end these arguments. IL would permit on French words on signs—but only if those in French are twice as big. One can already picture Quebec’s linguistic cleansers, armed with metric tape measures, calibrating the precise predominance of Voltaire’s language over Swift’s, (o the benefit of lawyers and satirists.
The pity is that the Quebec language war Caricatures a serious debate. French speakers are fearful of being overwhelmed by English speakers, as the latter are by Spanish speakers in Florida. These worries are scarcely new. American English speakers were so fearful of German a century ago that laws were enacted in the Midwest to forbid use of German in schools, In fact, monolingual America has gone so far the other way that it trails virally all industrial countries in language skills. A confident majority accepts and welcomes minority cultures. Given the pervasiveness of English in America, the majority tongue needs no legal protection. One wonders how English speakers in Miami who charge that Hispanic immigrants have created “another Cuba” can be indifferent to the Vitality that bilingualism brings to their city, That’s also true of Montreal. It is a human perversity that linguistic diversity should be seen as a curse.
“The New York Times”.
Article extracted from this publication >> May 21, 1993
