 With PETER BLACK Dr. Laurin's Children
The father of Bill 101 may be gone, but his children live on, and some of them live in unlikely places, like Nunavik, for example.
According to information from l'Office de la langue française, the body that oversees the promotion of Quebec's language charter, a surprising 57 percent of Quebec's Inuit children attend French school. This is remarkable for two reasons: One, the Inuit are under no legal obligation to send their kids to French school, and, two, just 10 years ago, rare indeed would have been the Inuit family who chose French over English education for their children.
While no one is suggesting the militantly federalist Inuit are about to switch allegiance - after all, English is still the second language of virtually all bilingual Inuit - the French class enrolment is an indicator of just how effective was the work of the recently departed Dr. Camille Laurin in transforming Quebec into a society that functions resoundingly in French.
This little linguistic factoid was dug out of a story in a booklet distributed across the province this week for La Francofête, the annual celebration of French survival in Quebec. Depending on how one looks at it, the passing of "Doc" Laurin on the eve of La Francofête puts a damper on events or provides a timely opportunity to pay tribute to his efforts.
In any event, the march forward of French initiated by Dr. Laurin in 1977 continues apace, as the young Inuit students attending a French junior college in Montreal can attest. The 20 students at Cegep Marie-Victorin are the vanguard of waves of students to come, the ones now in the primary and secondary school systems in the far-flung communities of what southerners call Nouveau Quebec.
According to Katsuaq Tulugak, a native of Povungnituk, more Inuit parents are opting for French because it increases the chances of their children getting a job and it makes it easier to communicate with the government of Quebec. The problem is, the teens note, that back home there's not much chance to practice French, since the languages spoken in the home and in the street are usually Inuktitut and English.
Of course, one does not have to go north of 55 to find evidence of Dr. Laurin's impressive legacy. Check out the streets of Montreal where the children of Bill 101, the first generation of immigrant experimental subjects has emerged from the doctor's language laboratory, the French school system. Of them, a majority are trilingual - French from school, English from the street and TV, and the mother tongue spoken at home - and an increasing proportion choose French as their preferred language and cultural milieu.
Take Luck Mervil, for example, one of the vedettes featured in the Francofête magazine. He's a Quebec-born star in the Paris production of the smash musical Notre Dame de Paris, created by fellow Quebecer Luc Plamondon. Mervil speaks French, English and Creole, but feels his artistic heart belongs to French because "it's magic. It's evolving all the time and we owe its most important change to rappers."
The guardians of gallic grammar at Le Devoir may take issue with Mervil's delight in the mutation of French, but the disciples of Dr. Laurin will gladly take any customer they can get.
What is interesting about today's crop of francophiles, as evidenced by the kind of euphoric commentary surrounding such things as the Francofête, is how utterly devoid the discourse is of words like "threatened," "endangered" and "disappearing." The more fashionable terms being employed are "thriving," "evolving," and "enduring."
This is a far cry from the era that led to the arrival in power of Dr. Laurin and the PQ. French then, they say, was on the ropes. Now it's on a roll, all because of Dr. Laurin's children.
Copyright © 1999 Peter Black/Log Cabin Chronicles/3.99 |
