Leonard Cohen
You may have read in the newspaper that, not long ago, Mister Legault, premier of the province of Québec, wanted students at McGill University, an English-speaking institution located in Montréal, to take a successful French test in order to graduate. Isn’t this extreme? Why do people in Québec always seem to be “overreacting” when it comes to French language?
We remember, from previous postings, that the ingredients for the identity of a Québécois used to be: 1. To be catholic, 2. To live in rural area, 3. To speak French. Since people in Québec have abandoned churches and farms, there is only one "ancestral element" left for them to anchor their identity, and that is the French language.
Regularly, Statistics Canada publishes the results of national surveys about the proportion of speakers of various languages in Canada, and when the numbers are out, many people in Québec adopt an alarmist attitude about what they read.
Question: What percentage of the population of Canada can speak French? Answer: 22%. Year after year, French speaking people are loosing ground in terms of demographic weight across Canada, from 27.5% in 2016 to 22% in 2021. The alarmist view goes like this: if French Canadians lost 5 percentage points in 5 years, does it mean that, at this rate, the demographic weight will reach 0% in 25 years? To imagine one’s own end is always a great source of anxiety. Of course, French Canadian will never disappear and the main cause of this sudden shift in proportion is the influx of immigrants who mostly choose to speak English.
Question: What percentage of the population of the province of Québec are native French speakers? Answer: 77%. Indeed, the proportion of French native speakers is 77% (2021) and only 46.95% (2011) on the Island of Montréal. Many immigrants moving to Québec often choose to speak English instead of French. All these trends result over time in a diminishing proportion of people speaking French in Québec. The introduction of Bill 101 in the 70s was an attempt to reverse the decline. That legislation was making the use of French mandatory in the work place and for signage. As a result, many English-speaking people living in Québec made the effort to become bilingual. But even today it is possible for someone to live in Québec their whole life without speaking French. And it is possible to be an English native speaker and a Québécois at the same time. This is why people in Québec see Leonard Cohen as one of their own.
If you walk on the streets of Montréal, you might see two giant murals of Leonard Cohen on the side of two buildings. As far as I know, no other artist, even French Canadian, was honored in such a way in Montréal. Leonard Cohen is considered a true Montrealer, maybe in part because his song “Suzanne” refers to locations in Montréal. Another song, “The Partisan” is one third in French. We might have to thank his love interest Dominique Issermann, from France, for enticing Leonard Cohen to perfect his French, to the point that he could answer difficult questions during interviews.
Here is “The Partisan” (with subtitles).
Next week: Humour
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