Talk:Francization

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Writing systems, a WikiProject interested in improving the encyclopaedic coverage and content of articles relating to writing systems on Wikipedia. If you would like to help out, you are welcome to drop by the project page and/or leave a query at the project’s talk page.
???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the Project’s quality scale.
???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the Project’s importance scale.

[edit] Quebec

I have commented out a section about anglicisms in Quebec French. It is clear that there are more anglicisms in informal Quebec French than in informal Continental French. In formal Quebec French, it is true that greater efforts are made to avoid anglicisms, although their pervasiveness in the everyday language makes this difficult, and many anglicisms find their way into writing, especially ones based on attributing an originally English meaning to a word that is French in form. Examples are éventuellement, présentement, graduellement, etc. The text I removed was an oversimplification of a complicated situation. If the exact quote from the reference supporting this is given, then I admit the burden will be on me to find a source contradicting it. Also, I would question whether this is the appropriate place to talk about French courses in the US. Joeldl 09:42, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, there are no sources which state that colloquial French has more anglicisms than Metropolitan French. Maybe it used to. I could be wrong. If you go to some parts of Quebec, one even finds "hambourgeois" and "chiens-chaud," for instance. You're right, however, about the situation being rather complicated. The line about French courses in the US was added to illustrate how Quebec French is viewed abroad (and in the rest of Canada.) It is a fact that it is often denigrated and put down (which the article in question deals with) because of the perception that it is not "real" French, which was one of the founding purposes of the Quebec Office, to counter this discriminatory view. Laval 23:03, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

There is an explicit response to Salien's article (which was the source for the statement about the rarity of anglicisms) by Auger and Valdman, who write the following in Julie Auger, Albert Valdman (1999), "Letting French Students Hear the Diverse Voices of Francophony", The Modern Language Journal 83 (3), 403–412.

• "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)."

My view, and I can't at this point single out a particular reference, is that anglicisms have been numerous in Quebec French since the Conquest, and they have been criticized at least since the 1840s (with Thomas Maguire's Manuel des difficultés les plus communes de la langue française (1841)). They have always been a major part of colloquial French in Quebec, and people have always sought to avoid them in writing because of their stigmatization. Anglicisms have become less common in writing in part because of the OLF's terminological work. In informal language, I doubt the OLF has ever had anything to say on whether people used words like canceller "cancel" or foqué "finished, done for, fucked". People have always been perfectly aware that these were anglicisms. Perhaps greater education has simply increased the stigmatization of nonstandard forms. Joeldl 06:39, 12 April 2007 (UTC)