I spent the long Veterans Day weekend in Montréal, Québec to escape the polarized, chaotic politics of my country, the U.S. I ended up finding the same thing there but with a fascinating linguistic flavor. While walking around the city and enjoying overpriced coffee and baked goods, I kept seeing political campaign signs that read, “Elevating Educational Heights Defending English Rights.”
Before heading to Montréal, I was aware of Québec’s neurotic obsession with speaking French in public life and their efforts to codify that standard, but I was not familiar with Montreal’s movement for “English Rights.” This led me to research Bill 96, a law enacted in 2022 by the Quebec provincial government designed to combat the declining use of the French language in the province. It is an amendment to the Charter of the French Language, which defines French as the official language of the province. The recent bill strengthens the charter and increases the enforcement power of the Office québécois de la langue française, a provincial agency charged with ensuring legislative requirements about the right to use French are respected.
My understanding of this dynamic as an ignorant, English-speaking American is that the Québécois feel their unique culture and society are put under threat by the rest of English-speaking Canada and the United States to the south. They feel the French language is integral to their history, society and way of life and are willing to go to great legal lengths to protect it. But Québec and Montréal have a sizable English-speaking minority who feel they contribute greatly to Québec society and deserve to have their linguistic rights preserved. This is the platform that Joe Ortona is running on in his bid for chair of the English Montréal School Board, the elected body that represents English public schools in Montréal.
Although a majority of Québec residents speak French, Canada as a whole is a predominantly English-speaking country. Québec’s French-speaking population has sought to preserve their language within the country, causing backlash among an English minority within Québec determined to preserve their own language and culture.
Language has always been a critical piece of identity and has therefore always been political as provinces, states and countries try to determine who belongs within their imagined political community. There’s the controversial language politics of Spain, the repression of the Kurdish language in Turkey and France’s language policy that effectively wiped out its regional languages. What’s interesting about Québec’s situation is that as it pursues its language policy against external English encroachment, it risks alienating its own English citizens.
As countries with provinces pursue any sort of cohesive identity, language tends to get in the middle in a messy way. On one hand, a national language is important for unity and communication. On the other hand, countries like Switzerland, Cameroon and Singapore seem to navigate their multilingualism with grace. They maintain a national identity while respecting the different languages of the community.
Québec is a fascinating example of an effort to try to force language onto people, but language tends to work in just the opposite way. People mix and move around and end up speaking to each other exactly how they want regardless of what the law or government says. Québec’s multilingualism is its cultural beauty, so perhaps its laws should better represent the reality of the linguistic diversity of its population.
