[LINK] Learning to like Irish and learning about Québécois' language identities

[rfmcdonald]

I've come across two interesting language-related posts I'd like to share with you.

I'd like to thank nhw for linking to Belgian Waffle's post Stair na Teanga. She describes, in the course of a long, entertaining, and very illuminating essay about how she first fell out of love with the Irish language and then came to like it again. Effective teaching pedagogies, as always, are key for the future of any successful language revivalist movement, that and the ability to demonstrate the language's continued relevance to the modern world.

At primary school, I spoke a great deal of Irish. All the day-to-day interactions of the school were in Irish. My best friend from school spoke Irish at home and I spent a lot of time in her house. I didn’t think of Irish as a subject at which I could be good or bad, it was just part and parcel of life. I didn’t have views about the Irish language. It was just there, like English, something you were surrounded by. It had no status in my mind as a “language”. It was not like exotic French or German which my parents spoke when they didn’t want us to understand them. Irish was homely, domestic, natural, easy and not at all exciting. Unlike, I now realise, the parents of many of my contemporaries, my parents spoke good Irish and were fond of the language. Although we never spoke Irish at home, they would often quote bits and pieces of Irish poems and use the odd word here and there. Only the other day, I was telling my mother about a mural the boys had done in school entitled “Anois teacht an Earraigh” and she was into the second verse of the poem before I could stop her.

When I was 12, I started secondary school. A lot of things happened that year. I moved house. I moved school. My best friend dumped me (alas, but so it was): I used to follow her around mournfully like a whipped puppy/a depressed ex-girlfriend (delete as you feel appropriate). Obviously, this meant I was no longer spending a great deal of time in her house. I became a gloomy teenager. I met French and we fell in love. One of the things I didn’t particularly notice at the time was that my relationship with Irish changed too. Irish was taught very differently at secondary school. It did not in any way infuse the school environment which was firmly anglophone. The idea that you might bring a message from one teacher to another in Irish was ludicrous. My first Irish teacher at secondary school was perfectly competent but suddenly I was learning Irish in a very overt way and it was new to me. For the first time I became conscious of a huge hostility towards Irish from my peers. They hated Irish, they hated Peig though we had yet to encounter her unique brand of pessism (her book begins “I am old woman now with one foot in the grave” and goes downhill from there). Anxious to be liked and regardless of my positive experience to date, I hated Irish too. I fervently envied the girl who came home from America aged 12 and was therefore exempt from studying Irish.

Elsewhere, in the National Post Graeme Hamilton writes ("Tintin runs into trouble 'en Québécois'") about how the production of a version of Tintin written in Québec French hasn't been very popular. Even though Québécois take pride in their own dialect of French, their dialect is spoken, not written; for foreigners to assume that they're not very francophone is not a small insult.

"In Quebec, we may speak strangely, but we write in French, and little Quebecers can read Tintin in the original, even learning a few new words along the way," Odile Tremblay wrote in Le Devoir. "So, a translation.... We have a bit of pride left. Don't go taking that from us. Seriously!"

Étienne Pollet, who oversees regional translations of Tintin for the series' Belgian publisher, Casterman, said the negative reaction in Quebec is unprecedented. Usually when a new translation comes out, fans empty bookstore shelves, he said from Belgium. "In Europe, these editions are always met by a frenzy. People are very honoured that there is a Tintin, not so much in their language, but in the language of their grandparents."

Quebecers, on the other hand, have been suspicious. "What struck me the most was people who said this book was being published to make fun of Quebecers. That was not my intention at all," Mr. Pollet said. "It is only in Quebec that we have encountered this peculiar reaction."

There is nothing revolutionary about tailoring a translation to a Quebec audience. Hollywood films and popular television shows regularly screen dubbed-in-Quebec French versions, even when a version from France already exists. Three years ago, after a Shrek movie was released in a French riddled with incomprehensible Parisian slang, there was an unsuccessful push for legislation forcing studios to dub their movies in Quebec for the Quebec audience. And Quebec writers -- most famously Michel Tremblay in his play Les Belles-soeurs -- long ago erased the taboo against using working-class Quebec joual in literature.

But language remains a touchy subject in Quebec, said Yves Laberge, a Quebec City sociologist who adapted the text of the Tintin book Coke en stock into Québécois (Colocs en stock). Sensitivity is all the greater when it is someone from outside -- in this case a Belgian publisher -- shining a light on the language of Quebec. "Some people want to believe that we speak exactly like in Europe, and others realize that it's not quite the same," he said. "The criticism was predictable in a way."