We know the formula: Quebecers don’t have to speak French, but they do need French to speak. The French language is not only a valuable means of communication for our people. She melts into her soul. It represents the existential core of his identity.
Hence the somewhat contradictory nature of the expression “French-speaking Québécois”, which I sometimes use elsewhere, for the sake of simplicity and because it is a useful specification of identity in our context.
But basically one would be tempted to say that reference to the Québécois is necessarily French-speaking, like a Portuguese is Portuguese-speaking, like an Italian is Italian-speaking, like a Greek is Greek-speaking.
Included?
It goes without saying that not all are equally francophone. Some are born, others through adoption or have learned French as a second language. But all have a vital connection to French.
Speaking about this today, I am concerned that the French language is being attacked in Quebec today.
And I’m not just talking about the outside pressure of English.
I’m talking about this cancer gnawing at her about what “inclusive” writing is.
This inclusive writing, which in just a few years has prevailed at the university, in the administration and is now colonizing the media, is based on a paranoid thesis: the French language is discriminatory, sexist and transphobic.
Therefore, it would be necessary to transform his writing to make it “inclusive”.
In this name, for example, we will no longer write “students” or even “students”, but we will write “students”. And do it systematically.
Therefore, teachers will no longer write he or she, but iel, and will no longer write that or that, but that.
The tongue is gradually chopped off and becomes simply unreadable.
And yet this spelling is gradually becoming mandatory. Because those who don’t use it obviously identify themselves as reactionary villains who don’t care about discrimination. This “inclusive writing” will eventually kill French.
I dread the next day when we’ll rewrite the classics in inclusive writing. We can experience the apocalypse of literature there.
Another threat to the French language: that laziness that officially makes us want to simplify the language, for example by destroying the rules surrounding the past participles, while we are content to impoverish them and in richness and subtlety to lose. .
impoverishment
There are teachers today who betray their mission and plead for this pseudo-simplification. They are making themselves heard these days.
Instead of doing their job and making people love the French language in all its riches, they will end up making it undesirable.
Behind this lies a resignation of intelligence. This resignation drags down an entire society, to the point of being unable to think and reflect. Sometimes I fear that this “goal” is about to be reached.
