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Posted on 2024-08-10
This is, in some ways, a sibling post to one I wrote back in June about giving myself more space to make mistakes with writing and other things I do.
I'm bad at writing and maybe that's fine
I'm happy to be bad at writing. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be writing this at all. The past two months have been fun for me as I've done more that brings me joy than I had in the prior half year. I also, again roughly aligning with the last two months, took a course on French professional communication. I did well, and in every class I felt a visceral sense of anxiety and shame.
So I think I ought to write about that.
Quebec, where I live, has an interesting complex when it comes to language. Despite the growing number of French speakers and the real success of Law 101 at making French the common language of the province, there's still an anxiety about French and it's supposed decline. Typically, people will gesture to a growing proportion of the population that doesn't speak French at home, hearing other languages spoken in public, high illiteracy rates and failure rates of the épreuve uniforme de français needed to graduate from most colleges.
In other words, for many this concern can't be divorced from xenophobia, and government policies are increasingly the standard reactionary measures, rather than anything that would remotely encourage or improve the use of the language. Our underfunded, overburdened education system isn't up to the task of teaching kids a language whose "standard" form is increasingly different from what they actually use? Just blame the immigrants, the anglos, and the anglo immigrants.
I do believe that there's significant value in actually protecting the French language in North America. While I support protecting languages other than English, especially indigenous languages, in the US and Canada generally, there is a personal connection to French for me. My dad's side of the family is primarily francophone. While most of my extended family is comfortably bilingual, my more immediate family is not. My dad and his family moved to the US when he was a child, and although he and his siblings are all francophone (and only learned English after moving), none of their children grew up learning French. The general sense among him, his siblings, and their partners was it just wasn't worth the effort.
I feel a real sense of sadness that all it took for a language to stop being spoken in my family a move and one generation. As the closest-to-bilingual of the cousins and the only one living around francophones, I feel like it's my responsibility to know the language.
Note that I didn't say "learn", just "know". I feel like French is something I should have learned a long time ago, making each mistake feel like a terrible failure. I feel like this sentiment has been encouraged by my interactions with others. After learning about my French-speaking family, many Quebecers have reacted with visible disappointment to my discomfort with the language. The bureaucracy here has also contributed to this, both through policy (being summoned to a French jury due to my name) and the people (being refused health insurance after being unable to understand the questions asked by an agent who would not speak to me in English or send me to someone who would).
I'm still working to learn French, but I have been primed to expect the worst when using it in public and don't see a way to get past that feeling other than by making the mistakes. Ultimately it's disappointing that this is the relationship I have to the language. I need to find some way to reset it and not have it be defined by insecurity. If only that were easy, but it seems everyone in Quebec feels insecure about their use of French.