MLJ Response Articles to Salien

Letting French Students Hear the Diverse Voices of Francophony JULIE AUGER Departments of French & Italian and Linguistics Ballantine Hall 642 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave. Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405–7103 Email: [email protected]

ALBERT VALDMAN Departments of French & Italian and Linguistics Ballantine Hall 642 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave. Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405–7103 Email: [email protected]

This response to Jean-Marie Salien’s editorial “Québec French: Attitudes and Pedagogical Perspectives” (MLJ, 82, 1998, pp. 95–102) deals with linguistic variation—particularly as it exists in Québec—and aims at familiarizing students of French as a foreign language in the U.S. with variation in that language. The article stresses how important it is for French teachers to have an accurate understanding of the French spoken in Québec. A characterization of Québec French should include the different varieties spoken, recognize sociolinguistic differences, and acknowledge the functional effectiveness of all varieties. To acquaint American learners of French with language variation, it is appropriate to expose them to the varieties that can be found in neighboring communities, such as Québec. This exposure can begin early so that learners will be able to recognize local particularities and variation. The use of a “pedagogical norm” is advisable, however, in guiding the learners’ own usage, because attitudes toward linguistic variants can produce negative reactions to nonnative speaker use of these features.

INTRODUCTION “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” (Dr. Samuel Johnson)

In a recent editorial published in this journal, Salien (1998) aimed to “review the arguments against stereotypes of Québec French, to present a defense of Québécois as an acceptable and teachable form of the French language, and to attract the attention of teachers of French to the pedagogical opportunities of this dialect” (p. 95). The The Modern Language Journal, 83, iii, (1999) 0026-7902/99/403–412 $1.50/0 ©1999 The Modern Language Journal

authors of the present response fully agree with all the goals pursued by Salien and find that his article made a number of very good points. For example, Salien was perfectly on target when he wrote that “[i]t is not Québec French that needs to be rectified but the attitudes toward it” (p. 99), and when he insisted that our view of Québec French must not be restricted to its most divergent version (which is often called joual) but must include the various registers that are available to French speakers from Québec. We feel, however, that a response is needed to correct some important factual mistakes that are found in Salien’s article, to clarify points that we feel could be misinterpreted or in which the author contra-

404 dicted himself, and to propose a less timid pedagogical approach that would introduce Québec French and other varieties of extrahexagonal French earlier in the curriculum of teaching French as a foreign language (FFL) in the United States. Our response is organized as follows. First, we provide a description of some of the major characteristics of the French language used in Québec. In this description, we focus on the same general types (archaisms, innovations, and borrowings) that Salien discussed in his editorial, but we try to give what we consider a more balanced view than Salien’s of the relative importance of these lexical categories in Québec French. Then we address the thorny issue of “norm” in its various instantiations. In so doing, we consider the timid emergence of endogenous norms in francophone communities, and we focus specifically on the question of whether there exists a separate Québec French norm that is widely recognized in Québec and that might be taught on an equal footing with the so-called international norm. Finally, we describe a pedagogical approach that recognizes the existence of what Valdman (1976) has called a “pedagogical norm” while, at the same time, granting extrahexagonal varieties of French a place of their own early on in programs of FFL. WHAT IS QUÉBEC FRENCH? It might be best to start our characterization of Québec French by stating explicitly what it is not. First of all, it is important to clear up a potential misinterpretation that might arise from Salien’s (1998) description of the fate of European languages imported into the Americas. Whereas Salien himself did not describe Québec French as a pidgin or a patois, his insistence on this type of language contact in the Americas might mislead readers unfamiliar with Québec French into thinking that it is another example of a language that has gone through a pidgin stage.1 This is absolutely not the case, because Québec French has been and remains, as Salien made clear, a variety of French, rather than a new language which would have been created through extensive contact between various languages. Second, as Salien (1998) very justly pointed out, Québec French cannot be equated with joual, its most stigmatized instantiation. As with any language community, we find that the way people speak varies depending on such factors as geographical origin, socioeconomic class, degree of education, age, and the type of social setting

The Modern Language Journal 83 (1999) (to whom they are speaking, the topic that they are discussing, the audience, etc.). In describing language use in linguistic communities, it is important to distinguish between two basic functions: (a) oral communication within a restricted in-group with dense social ties: the family, friends, the neighborhood; and (b) intergroup communication which, for literate societies, is often effected by means of the written medium. To assume the latter function, a vehicular variety, maintained relatively invariant by its decontextualized use and the support of the written medium, develops and becomes a standard with reference to which the other varieties, the vernacular, appear to be divergent. Because vehicular varieties are typically used in situations lacking the redundancy offered by the rich communicative context typical of oral face-to-face vernacular (colloquial) speech, they tend to favor fuller syntactic forms, more explicit phrasings, and to avoid many of the context-dependent linguistic features that are normal in situations of communication where the participants can rely on a great deal of shared information. How hard speakers try to use the vehicular variety in a formal context depends on how important it is for them to “speak well” (e.g., a receptionist is expected to speak “better” French than a car mechanic or a hairdresser; cf. Sankoff & Laberge’s, 1978, application of Bourdieu’s, 1982, notion of the linguistic market to the French-speaking community in Montreal), and how “successful” they are at doing so depends, to a large extent, on how much practice they have in using standard French. All of these linguistic productions are instances of Québec French, and, for this reason, we suggest that the term Québec French should include joual, standard Québec French, and all the intermediate varieties that one might want to distinguish. It certainly seems unfair to us to consider that the speech of working-class speakers from Montreal, as it is represented, for example, in Michel Tremblay’s (1978, 1986, 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1997) novels, commonly known collectively as Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal,2 should not be included in Québec French. To exclude from Québec French the speech of one of the social classes of the province would seem to deny all these speakers membership in the overall speech community. The mention of the term speech community raises the question of the geographical limits of what we call Québec French. As its name indicates, Québec French refers to the variety of French that is used within the limits of the province of Québec in Canada. Therefore, it excludes

Julie Auger and Albert Valdman Acadian French, a variety of French that is spoken in the Atlantic provinces of Canada and that is depicted, for example, in the writings of Antonine Maillet.3 Whereas there are a number of lexical, grammatical, and phonological similarities between the two varieties of Canadian French, there are also numerous differences (e.g., J’vous payerons ça un jour [we will pay you back one day] is part of the verbal paradigm of Acadian French,4 not Québec French), and, for that reason, Québec and Acadian French are considered to be two separate dialects of French. Even though they have different grammars, they are generally regarded by their speakers as different forms of the same language (cf. Santerre, 1990a, concerning the fact that Québec and Acadian French are two different dialects and Santerre, 1990b, concerning the fact that joual is restricted to Québec French). Learners of French may wonder why Québec French seems so different from French. On the one hand, they should realize that standard Québec French differs minimally from so-called international French (cf. section below on the question of norm). On the other hand, although joual, or colloquial Québec French (CQF) as we prefer to call it,5 differs from the variety of French that learners are taught in class, it is not so different from varieties of vernacular French spoken in Paris, other parts of France, or other European countries. For example, in the colloquial varieties spoken on the two sides of the Atlantic ocean, final consonant clusters containing a liquid (r or l), are simplified: compare, in Referential French (RF), l’arbre (the tree), il montre (he shows), and le chiffre (the number) with français populaire and CQF l’arb’, i mont’, and le chiff’. Indeed, linguists who specialize in the study of Québec French are regularly “disappointed” by the lack of “originality” of this variety, since many nonstandard structures of Québec French can be found in European varieties of French. CQF is most distinct from other varieties of French in its phonology and its vocabulary. Some words and pronunciations are part of Québec French because they were brought from France in the 17th century, but others have evolved on the North American continent. The 17th-century forms that have disappeared from standard French but not from Québec French are considered to be archaisms. This is an important characteristic of Québec French, and it is probably true that many of these archaisms are more frequent in the speech of working-class speakers than in the speech of highly educated speakers. For example, moé instead of moi /mwa/ (me)

405 used to be the “standard” pronunciation in France until the French Revolution; nowadays, it is common mostly in the speech of working-class and rural speakers in Québec. But saying that “it is the archaisms that truly define québécois” (Salien 1998, p. 97) is, in our opinion, inaccurate. As Salien himself pointed out, speakers who take their native languages into new territories must remodel their instrument of communication to fit their new needs. Whereas there is generally no need to remodel the phonological and grammatical systems of one’s language, it is obvious that new words must be created or borrowed, and meanings of existing words must be allowed to shift to come to refer to new plants, animals, activities, and so forth. This creative and adaptive process is how Québec French has acquired two words meaning “cranberry” (atoca is borrowed from an Amerindian language, and canneberge is a word whose origin is unknown according to Le Petit Robert, 1996, and Poirier, 1998b). One word whose meaning has been altered is prélart, which was originally the canvas sheet normally used to cover merchandise on ships and which had become a standard type of floor covering in New France. Over time, the type of floor covering changed, but the word has remained; today, prélart in Québec means “linoleum” (cf. also prélat in Acadian French). Many words have been borrowed from English (e.g., la drave, from English to drive, which refers to the activity of driving wood on rivers at the end of winter). Some of these borrowed, adapted, and created words have become part of what can be called standard Québec French, as we will see in the next section. Others, although used by most speakers of Québec French, tend to be reserved for informal types of settings (e.g., binnes instead of fèves au lard for a traditional dish made of white beans and lard). Finally, still other words, such as char for “car,” may be restricted to working-class speech in certain regions or to informal settings in others.6 The issue of feminine forms for titles of profession has provided another source of innovations in Québec French. Whereas France has just decreed that it will attempt, for the second time, to adapt the French language to reflect the fact that numerous women are now professors, ministers, ambassadors, and so forth, the Office de la langue française of Québec province decided in the 1980s that feminine forms had to be created for every professional title whose form was clearly masculine. As a result, new words such as professeure (professor.fem) and agente (agent.fem) have been created, and unproductive morphological

406 patterns such as -eur/-eure have found a new life (e.g., the form chercheuse [researcher.fem] seems to be in the process of being replaced by chercheure in Québec). These new feminine forms are used at all levels of Québec French, including the most informal types of social settings. A definition of joual or of québécois that excludes all innovations and limits it to its archaisms describes a linguistic variety that would dramatically restrict the topics that can be discussed and what can be said about them. If we add to this restrictive definition Salien’s (1998) characterization of the grammar of joual as observing a less identifiable set of rules than québécois, one wonders how joual speakers can say anything at all. This kind of joual does not exist. The idea that a language or a linguistic variety has a grammar only if the latter is described in grammar books is very common among nonlinguists. Because their rules are codified by reference grammars and their vocabulary is inventoried periodically by dictionaries, and because their grammar and orthography are taught explicitly in school, vehicular varieties give the misleading impression of being more rule-governed than vernaculars. For example, a dialect speaker from the Vosges area in eastern France once commented on the fact that German and French both have a grammar, but his dialect lacked any grammatical structure (Mougin, 1991). But in an article aiming to defend Québec French and to promote its use in French classes, such a misconception achieves the opposite result. The first thing we teach students in introductory linguistics courses is that all languages have a grammar. The rules of a nonstandard dialect may very well differ from those of the standard variety of the language, but even if the rules have never been described and are not taught explicitly, they are part of the linguistic competence of every native speaker of this nonstandard variety. Otherwise, no effective communication would be possible. Let us examine an example that makes this point clear. One very widespread colloquial grammatical feature of Québec French is the interrogative/exclamative particle -tu (e.g., Picard, 1992). Even though its use is not described in any school grammar of (Québec) French,7 and even though native speakers have never been taught the rules governing the use of -tu, they apply these rules systematically, without any errors. Briefly, the rules can be summarized as follows: (a) -tu is an interrogative/exclamative marker that is compatible with subjects of any person, in spite of the fact that it is homophonous with the pronoun tu (you.sg); (b) it appears after the conjugated part

The Modern Language Journal 83 (1999) of a verb in a yes/no question or an exclamation (cf. 1 and 2 below); and (c) it cannot be used if another question or exclamation word is used (as shown by the * in 3–5 indicating a “deviant” form). 1. Je me suis-tu trompée? 2. 3. 4. 5.

(Did I make a mistake?) Il fait-tu beau un peu! (It’s so nice out!) *Est-ce que je me suis-tu trompée? *Quand c’est que je me suis-tu trompée? *Qu’il fait-tu beau un peu!

Defining and describing Québec French is not an easy task. Languages are not static entities, but rather dynamic communication systems that are used by speakers from different social backgrounds in varied social settings. This dynamic nature of the language must be recognized, and Salien’s (1998) contribution rightly stressed the fact that Québec French is not a monolithic entity consisting only of nonstandard words and constructions. Salien also corrected the impression too often expressed in alarmist reports that the number of English borrowings in Québec French is enormous (but he went too far, in our opinion, when he concluded that the number of anglicisms in québécois would be “extremely limited”: anglicisms may not be the single most important ingredient of Québec French, but they are an ingredient nonetheless). However, once we recognize the normal complexity of the sociolinguistic situation in Québec, we should be careful not to oversimplify the picture by simply transferring the misconceptions that we are trying to dispel about Québec French to a subset of Québec French, namely joual. Linguistic varieties acquire the social characteristics of their speakers, and this social identification is why some linguistic varieties are considered more prestigious than others, while some are thought to be deficient, ugly, and inappropriate for encoding complex thoughts. From a functional point of view, however, all such varieties are equal, because they all allow their speakers to communicate effectively with members of their speech community. Both of these notions should be made very clear to language learners. IS THERE A QUÉBÉCOIS STANDARD FRENCH NORM? Despite a proliferation of often misused labels (subdued dialect, patois, creole, baragouin, norms, vernacular, etc.), Jean-Marie Salien (1998) failed to characterize properly the socio-

Julie Auger and Albert Valdman linguistic relationship among the Québécois speech varieties he identified but mislabeled: joual, that is, colloquial Québécois French; Québécois French, that is, standard Québécois French, and international French, that is, Hexagonal Standard French. In the final analysis, the relationship among Québécois speech varieties parallels that which exists among varieties in use in France. What Jean-Marie Salien labeled joual is simply the marked pole of oral colloquial Québécois speech and is more likely to be found among working-class speakers than among upper-class speakers. Traits of colloquial Hexagonal French, labeled français populaire (FP), such as variants of est-ce que (e.g., où que tu vas, où ce que tu vas, etc. instead of où est-ce que tu vas [Where are you going?]), occur mainly among members of the French working class. This is not to say that less marked features of FP, such as the absence of the negative marker ne and the deletion of /l/ in the third person masculine subject pronouns, are absent from the colloquial speech of middle-class speakers (e.g., i’ sait pas ce qu’i’ dit for il ne sait pas ce qu’il dit [He doesn’t know what he’s saying]). These colloquial features also occur in the speech of middle-class educated Québécois. It follows that joual as redefined here shows striking divergences from what Salien labeled International French, which, given its status as the established norm for all francophone communities, Poirier (1998a) preferred to call français de référence, Referential French (RF). An issue that divides Québécois linguists is whether between CQF and RF there exists a Québécois standard norm. According to Martel and Cajolet-Laganière (1995), this putative local norm, Standard Québécois French (SQF), represents a prestige variety used in formal situations. For Poirier (1998a), the development of this local standard norm is one of the results of a form of linguistic nationalism that accompanied the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Another contributing factor in the development of SQF is the emergence of a Québécois middle class that turned its back on the Church-dominated traditional society and began to compete with its anglophone peers for control of the province’s commercial and industrial sectors (Gendron, 1990). To succeed, it had to promote the use of French in the workplace, and it also set forth to improve the “quality” of French, that is, to create a local standard norm distinct from colloquial speech. SQF differs from CQF by the elimination at the phonological level of highly divergent pronunciation features, such as the lowering of the front

407 mid vowel [⑀] to [æ] (pard’ for perdre [to lose]). SQF is set off from RF by differences in prosody (intonation, stress, rhythm) and the retention of less marked local phonetic traits, such as lax high vowels in checked syllables ([␫] as in vite [quickly] or [␷] as in toute [all]). As indicated in the characterization of Québec French above, at the lexical level all varieties of Québec French differ from their French congeners by particularities including archaisms, borrowings from English and indigenous Amerindian languages, and neologisms. Poirier (1998a) stressed the fact that Québécois particularities involving widespread divergences in the meaning of words shared by SQF and RF—for example, cartable, which means “school bag” in France but “file binder” in Québec—belie the differences between the lexicon of these two standard varieties. SQF has been legitimized by the publication of general dictionaries in which Québécois particularities form an integral part of the nomenclature instead of token inclusions (Boulanger, 1993; Poirier, 1988). A salient lexical feature of the lexicon of SQF is the rejection of anglicisms adopted by RF in favor of local terms, either calques like fin de semaine for week-end (week-end) or internal creations like traversier for ferry-boat (ferry). Still, SQF remains modeled on RF. According to Poirier (1998a) and Martel and Cajolet-Laganière (1995), it is a compromise between the adoption of RF and the acceptance of the divergent local features of CQF. Taking a different stance, Philippe Barbaud (1997) categorically rejected the notion of an autonomous endogenous Québécois norm. For him a norm is not derived from the use of language in context but from an abstract code: De nos jours, ce n’est plus l’usage qui fait la norme mais le code. Non pas le code identitaire basé sur l’oralité québécoise, mais le code véhiculaire qui assure la cohésion de la francophonie. (p. 79) (Today, it is no longer usage which generates the norm but the code. Not the code linked to a linguistic identity based on Québécois speech, but the vehicular code which makes cohesion possible within Francophony.)

According to Barbaud, the majority of French speakers in Québec readily accept the superiority of RF, a view that draws support from Martel and Cajolet-Laganière’s (1995) position discussed above and the fact that the editors of both of the recent dictionaries of Québec French (Poirier, 1988; Boulanger, 1993) showed a reluctance to include or acknowledge widely used anglicisms (Paquot, 1997). For example, both dictionaries failed to mention the existence of canceller as a

408 synonym of annuler (to cancel) and the use of fan along with ventilateur (fan). They also omitted the polysemous adjective fucké (confused, run down, stoned), which is common in the speech of young people.8 Barbaud pointed out that the Québécois view of RF differs from that of Hexagonal speakers: They are likely to perceive it as encompassing features of divergent regional varieties of French, such as the Meridional accent characteristic of southern France. In conclusion, given the ambivalence of educated Québécois toward CQF and RF, an endogenous SQF can only be described as incipient. Therefore, teachers of FFL must exercise prudence in characterizing the different varieties evidenced in the authentic samples of Québec written language and speech that are introduced in the classroom. PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES Precisely because “any unfamiliar language sounds strange,” we should make sure that students are exposed early to different varieties of French. The lack of general agreement about the existence of an endogenous SQF and the powerful attraction still exerted by RF leads us to reassert, as Salien (1998) put it, “the supremacy of Hexagonal French” (p. 101) in the teaching of FFL. However, we adopt a much bolder approach than his in letting learners hear the diverse voices of non-Hexagonal francophones. Because he believes that it would be pedagogically inconvenient (“it would be impractical and would invite too much confusion,” p. 101), Salien would postpone the introduction of authentic texts (and presumably oral samples) of Québec French until late in the introductory-intermediate basic language sequence at the university level: The best approach is one that involves delaying the introduction of dialects until the college years, ideally after sufficient language skills have been attained. . . . The best level for this introduction appears to be the fourth semester of college, preferably in a reading and conversation class. (p. 100)

It is this pusillanimous pedagogical attitude that, before the generalization of communicative approaches, led foreign language teachers to postpone oral practice until students had mastered the basic structure of the written language and acquired an adequate vocabulary. Today still, it also leads too often to delaying the insistence on accurate pronunciation until so-called remedial phonetic courses, usually scheduled in the third

The Modern Language Journal 83 (1999) year of college study. If adopted, Salien’s timid pedagogical strategy would deprive secondary school FFL learners of any contact with non-Hexagonal varieties. In view of the high attrition rate in basic college French course sequences, only a small minority of the “happy few” would have the opportunity to hear the diverse voices of Francophony.

Acquainting Learners with Geographical Variants If we truly wish to acquaint American learners of FFL with the linguistic particularisms of nonHexagonal francophones, especially those of neighboring communities, we must begin early on, even in beginning secondary school courses. As Valdman (1996) declared in the article to which Salien took exception, the stress must remain on receptive skills; the imparting of local features for active control should be limited either to learners who will need to use Québec French for special purposes or to those who would like to interact with American francophones in Louisiana or New England. But, for reasons that will be presented below, great caution must be exercised before asking learners to adopt linguistic features that differ from those of RF. Most current college French textbook packages acquaint learners with linguistic particularisms of various extra-Hexagonal francophone regions. For example, many university-level elementary textbooks have opted to introduce terms for university life in the context of the institutions of higher learning of Québec rather than those of France because the Québécois curricula and system of degrees more closely match those with which American students are familiar. In the universities of Québec province, students select major and minor subjects, and the baccalauréat degree which marks the end of undergraduate studies corresponds to the American B.A. or B.S. Some textbooks go even further and, by the means of cultural notes, acquaint students with marked cultural and linguistic differences between Québécois and French usage. The following cultural note, excerpted from Valdman and Pons (1997) characterizes the current Francophony-oriented beginning French textbooks: Une langue bien de chez nous. . . Les Québécois ont leur prononciation, leurs mots à eux. Ils utilisent aussi certains mots de manière différente, par exemple: • Les trois repas principaux de la journée sont: le déjeuner, le dîner et le souper.

Julie Auger and Albert Valdman • Quand quelqu’un dit merci on répond: bienvenue ou de rien et non pas je vous en prie.9 (p. 143) (Our very own language. . . Quebeckers have their own pronunciation, their own words. They also use words differently, for example: • The three main meals of the day are: le déjeuner [vs. le petit déjeuner] for “breakfast,” le dîner [vs. le déjeuner] for “dinner,” and le souper [vs. le dîner] for “supper.” • When someone says merci [thanks], you answer: bienvenue or de rien and not je vous en prie [you’re welcome].)

Quite appropriately, at the beginning, particularisms are limited to the lexical level, but at a later stage attention might also be directed to phonological features inasmuch as it is their accent that learners find distinctive when they first hear speakers of Québec French. In a textbook on French remedial phonetics, Valdman (1993) points out that one of the characteristics of the Québécois accent—and in fact of all varieties of North American French, including Cajun and Acadian—is the presence of two variants of the high vowels. In technical terms, the vowels /i/, /y/, and /u/ have positional allophones: a lax one in checked syllables, that is, those ending with a consonant, and a tense one in free syllables, that is, those ending with these vowels: Tout comme la voyelle /i/, dans les variétés de français d’Amérique du Nord, et en particulier en français québécois, /u/ a une variante relâchée en syllabe fermée: douce [d␷s]. . . . Comparez les prononciations du français standard et du français québécois, respectivement, dans les mots suivants: toute [tut] vs. [t␷t]. . . . Mais en syllabe finale ouverte, par contre, dans tout [tu] ou vous [vu], la voyelle est tendue dans les deux variétés de langue. (p. 47) (As is the case with the vowel /i/, in North American varieties of French, and in particular in Québec French, /u/ has a lax variant in checked syllables: douce [d␷s]. Compare the Standard French and Québec French pronunciations, respectively, in the following words: toute [tut] vs. [t␷t]. . . . But in free syllables, on the other hand, in tout [tu] ou vous [vu], the vowel is tense in the two language varieties.)

The Notion of Pedagogical Norm In view of the fact that the Québécois recognize speech free of marked local features, for example, the apical trill variant of r or diphthongs, as more suitable for formal styles, it would be inappropriate for learners of FFL to adopt these features. Naive native speakers do not expect foreign learners to speak as they do; they expect them to speak “better.” That is to say, they do not view favorably the use by foreigners of colloquial

409 speech forms and marked regional or social accents, especially by those who have acquired the language through formal instruction. Indeed, it seems that native speakers resent, as a form of intrusion, the appropriation of these forms by foreigners, particularly because they themselves may consider colloquial forms as incorrect or slipshod. In addition, in terms of Bourdieu’s (1982) notion of the linguistic market, foreign learners who have invested considerable effort, time, and often money in learning a foreign language would expect a fair return on this linguistic capital in the form of mastery of the most socially prestigious variety of the target language. A realistic goal for advanced learners of FFL includes the ability on their part to recognize or to be aware of certain local particularities, especially, in the case of American learners, those of neighboring francophone communities such as Québec province. But it is unrealistic and inappropriate to expect them to acquire the full range of linguistic variation of a particular category of native speakers, be they working class Parisians or educated Montrealers. Instead, the target for acquisition should be a neutral variant, a pedagogical norm (Valdman, 1976), which is determined by three sets of factors: sociolinguistic, epilinguistic, and acquisitional. Given the difficulty of assessing the weight of the latter type of factors, we deal only with sociolinguistic and epilinguistic factors. From a sociolinguistic point of view, a pedagogical norm should reflect the formal usage of target native speakers—in the case of French, educated speakers from metropolitan France and, to the extent that it does not differ substantially from that norm, the speech of educated speakers from regions where French is the dominant native language: the French community of Belgium, French-speaking Switzerland, and Québec. Although the speech of educated francophones from regions where French is a second language, for example, Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa, differs little from that of their Hexagonal peers, it is, nonetheless, colored by particularities reflecting local languages. Epilinguistic factors subsume attitudes toward linguistic variants, those of both native speakers and learners. Empirical studies suggest that native speakers negatively view linguistic variants characteristic of colloquial speech styles, which they erroneously associate with lower-class speakers. Behnstedt (1973) investigated variants of interrogative constructions bearing on a sentence constituent rather than the predicate (i.e., constructions such as Où allez-vous ? [Where are you

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going?] rather than Allez-vous à Paris? [Are you going to Paris?]). He found that, in informal situations, middle-class French speakers used primarily the IN SITU (Vous allez où?), and FRONTING (Où vous allez?) variants. In formal situations, however, INVERSION (Où allez-vous ?) was the most frequent variant (see Table 1). A fourth construction, EST-CE QUE (Où est-ce que vous allez?), occurred with low frequency in both types of situations. But when asked to estimate the distribution of these four variants in their usual speech, they underestimated IN SITU and FRONTING and overestimated EST-CE QUE and INVERSION. These facts suggest that, in setting a pedagogical norm, teachers of FFL should avoid the two most frequent informal style variants because they are somewhat stigmatized. Instead, they should opt for EST-CE QUE because it is sociolinguistically neutral and, in addition, has fewer syntactic constraints than INVERSION.

CONCLUSION We agree with Jean-Marie Salien that the linguistic particularities of Québécois and those of any francophone community in and outside of France must not become the object of scorn or derision among French teachers. As we enter the 21st century, American classroom learners of FFL must be made to realize that French is no longer the means of communication and expression for a very restricted linguistic community—educated and cultivated Parisian middle-class speakers—but the medium by which many nationalities and ethnic groups, some multilingual and all of them multidialectal, express themselves and their cultures. To the extent that course sequences make it feasible, students should be informed about the culture of these communities and exposed to their particular way of speaking French. The first priority should be to focus on neighboring francophone communities in North America.

For students living close to Louisiana, the focus should be on the Cajuns10 and creoles of the Bayou country; for those in upper New York state and New England, it should be on the FrancoAmericans and their Acadian and Québécois cousins. The remarkable efforts made by the Québécois to promote their language and culture on a continent dominated by English and to maintain their particular varieties of French despite the overwhelming presence of the Hexagon-based RF merit that they be brought to the awareness of all American students of FFL. But to avoid the unfortunately numerous misrepresentations or actual errors of Salien’s wellintentioned plea, French teachers need to be better informed about the linguistic situation of non-Hexagonal francophone communities.11 They must maintain a clear-sighted and objective perspective, yet at the same time remain sensitive to the attitudes of spokespersons for these communities. We have attempted to achieve these goals here in trying to describe the complex linguistic situation of the Québécois community. We have also outlined a bolder strategy for acquainting American learners of FFL with Québécois speech and culture. However, the lack of unanimity among Québécois linguists on the existence of a local standard norm together with broader pedagogical considerations encapsulated in the notion of a pedagogical norm lead us to agree with Valdman’s (1996) guarded recommendation for using RF as the standard for students’ oral expression: La présentation de documents authentiques, qui sert d’ancrage aux approches actuelles de l’enseignement du FLE ne requiert-elle pas que l’on fasse écouter les voix réelles de la francophonie aux apprenants sans toutefois—et j’insiste làdessus—leur demander de les imiter? (p. 2) (Does the use of authentic documents, which serves to anchor current approaches in the teaching of FFL, not require that we have learners listen to the real voices of Francophony without nonetheless—and I insist on this—asking them to imitate them?)12

TABLE 1 Relative Frequency of Partial Interrogative Structure Variants among Middle-class Speakers: Actual Versus Estimated Use Actual Use Interrogative Variant FRONTING IN SITU EST-CE QUE INVERSION

Formal Style

Informal Style

Estimated Use

10% 25% 3% 62%

47% 35% 15% 3%

30% 20% 20% 30%

Note. Based on data from Behnstedt, 1973.

411

Julie Auger and Albert Valdman NOTES 1 Some readers might even find support for this pidginization scenario in such apparent simplifications as the use of a gender-neutral subject pronoun in the third person plural (e.g., Ils sont gentilles [they are nice.fem]) or in some regularized forms such as il haït /ai/ [he hates] instead of il hait /⑀/. However, we must not forget that Québec French does not reflect only simplifications. Indeed, in some cases, it encodes finer distinctions than standard French (or, as we will call it, referential French). For example, in colloquial Quebec French (CQF), the pronoun vous serves to address a single person, while vous-autres refers to a group of people (e.g., Vous, venez ici! [You.sg, come here] vs. Vous-autres, venez ici! [You-guys, come here]). Standard French uses vous for both. Similarly, while the verbal form /ᐊu/ is either third person singular or third person plural in the indicative present for the verb jouer (to play: il joue and ils jouent), many speakers of Québec French use /ᐊu/ in the singular (il joue) and /ᐊuz/ in the plural (ils jousent). 2 This collection is frequently cited as an illustration of the literary use of joual. 3 In her works, this Acadian author has her characters speak the colloquial Acadian speech of New Brunswick, sometimes called chiac, not the Québécois joual. 4 It is not a “suppression . . . of French conjugation rules” (Salien, 1998, p. 97), but rather a retention of an older French verbal form for first person plural (cf. Poirier, 1928). 5 Because joual is either very vague in its meaning or very pejorative (e.g.,“parler joual: parler de façon inarticulée, incorrecte, inintelligible, parler mal,” Poirier, 1998b), and because it is often difficult, though not necessarily impossible (cf. note 6), to distinguish between the speech of the working class and the colloquial usage of other social classes, linguists tend to prefer more neutral terms such as “français québécois informel,” “français ordinaire,” or, in English, colloquial Québec French. 6 Poirier (1998b, pp. 184-187) noted that the use of char in the sense of “car” is “familier.” According to Julie Auger’s feeling as a native speaker of Québécois, it is restricted to working-class and rural speech. 7 Léard’s Grammaire québécoise d’aujourd’hui (1995) gives useful information on the use and history of interrogative -tu, but this account is not a pedagogical tool meant for elementary or high school students in Québec. 8 Note, however, that Boulanger (1993) adopted a bolder approach than Poirier (1988) with respect to anglicisms, because the former includes many English words that are missing from the latter (e.g., chum [friend, significant other]; fun as in avoir du fun [to have fun] or C’est une fille bien le fun [She’s fun to be with]; bine [white bean; traditional dish made of white beans and lard]). It even includes the common but criticized use of lumière to refer to a traffic light. 9 As one MLJ reader points out, je vous en prie can be heard occasionally in Québec French, but its use is re-

stricted to very formal settings. As a result, it is used much more rarely than bienvenue or de rien. 10 Louisianans involved in activities for the maintenance of their vernacular speech and the creation of a standard written norm prefer to refer to their language as cadien, pronounced /kadᐊ˜e/, instead of cadjin. 11 For instance, French teachers should know that French is spoken by only a minority of the population of many so-called francophone countries. In Haiti, for example, the proportion of the population possessing a communicative competence in French is estimated to be between 2% and 10%. French is spoken by a majority of the population only in France, the French community of Belgium (Wallonie), French-speaking Switzerland, and Québec. 12 Salien (p. 101) not only cited part of this passage without the critical first part referring to teaching materials, but in changing the interrogative form to the declarative by omitting the inverted subject pronoun (requiert-elle ⬎ requiert), rendered this statement much more categorical than it was intended.

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The following article, “Quebec French: A Canadian Response,” by Barbara Dickinson, also responds to Salien’s (1998) Editorial in MLJ , 82, 95–102. See Salien’s comment to both responses on page 416 of this issue.