le télézard

I'm guessing at the spelling of that title word.

On Friday mornings, one of the regular guests on René Homier-Roy's morning show on Radio Canada Montréal, "C'est bien meilleur le matin," is a linguist named Guy Bertrand, nicknamed by RHR "the Ayatollah." M. Bertrand is there to review his list of language mistakes committed by RHR and his other regular contributors (the weather reporter, the political reporter, the traffic reporter) during the past week. He analyzes general misuses of words, occasional dicey problems with subject-verb agreement, but most of all, anglicisms for which there is a correct French equivalent.

Since Québec is an island of French speakingness in the middle of a North American ocean of English, Québécois French includes a number of expressions borrowed or translated from the surrounding English. Just as English has a lot of French words imposed by the Norman Conquest and 300-year rule of England, North American French has been under the influence of English since the British Conquest of 1760. (More about The Conquest perhaps another day.) How to deal with this linguistic influence has been the source of much debate ever since that time.

This week's highlight was M. Bertrand's offering of a correct replacement for the American term, "couch potato." The linguist gets his information from the most reputable dictionaries and academic sources, but I don't recall where he got this one: The French term for "couch potato" is télézard. You can see the "télé"part of it, and "lézard" is lizard.

I find this hilarious, and everybody on the show thought so, too. It's very inventive and expresses well the idea of a creature that practically never moves from one spot. It night also have an advantage over the English term in that a lizard is an animal that is actually capable of movement.

Why does the program invite a linguist to come and correct language mistakes once a week? Here is my own analysis. Until the Révolution Tranquille of the 1960s and 1970s, francophones in Québec occupied a position of inferiority in their society. This included lower levels of education. Francophones dropped out of school in large numbers to take up jobs in manual labor and factory work. If this was your life's expectation, what was the point of going through grade 12? In addition, the religious-controlled schools most francophones attended emphasized teaching religion much more than giving a good education. What's more important? Training children to save their immortal souls, or teaching reading, writing, math, science? As a result, the French spoken by many francophones was poor in vocabulary and sophistication, uneducated language. It was the language of people who left school after 6th grade, and it wasn't much of a 6th grade education. There was a highly educated elite, who attended a different set of schools, but they were a minority of francophones.

We forget that, without schooling, just growing up and living in X-speaking society leaves us with a relatively impoverished grasp of our native language and of how to use it across a wide range of domains of learning. Think of an American whose education ended after the 6th grade. Unless he's an autodidact who has made a special effort, his English skills and ability to use the language to read about, talk about, think about history, science, politics, and a whole range of topics, is much more limited than what is available to someone with more education.

Since the Québécois took power from the anglophones in the Révolution Tranquille, they have worked very hard not only to make French the language of business, politics, and the areas that hold power in their lives, they have also worked to make that French a richer, more educated language. The French spoken in Québec now has changed quite a lot since the 1950s. It has a bigger vocabulary to give its speakers access to more domains, and accents have moved toward an international standard to allow conversation with French speakers in other countries. I can't find it now on Radio-Canada's website today, but a few years ago, R-C's mission statement included the goal of improving and enriching the French language broadcast on its airwaves.

Americans, and other anglophones, often think, "The Québécois and the French hate English," I hope my explanation here sheds some light on why it's not just speaking your language, but making it a well-developed language, that's important.

And where's your five minutes weekly of radio where a language expert explains to listeners the difference between "imply"and "infer," "lie," and "lay," and the pronunciation of "nuclear?" (Trust me, GW Bush isn't the first to stumble over that last one.) Do you think American listeners would tolerate 5 minutes weekly of linguistic correction?

C'est bien meilleur le matin http://www.radio-canada.ca/radio/emissions/emission.asp?numero=27 The Chronique Linguistique is in the half-hour between 6:00 and 6:30.

wikipedia in English: Office de la Langue Française http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_de_la_langue_francaise

a terrific book: Conseil supérieur de la language française. (2008). Le français au Québec: 400 ans de vie. Sous la direction de Michel Plourde. Québec: Fides.
This will be, BTW, the text in the seminar on Québec I am teaching next semester, FL 470 "Le français au Québec et ses locuteurs: missionaires, explorateurs, écrivains, artistes"